I few things to say at the beginning here before delving into to the actual content of “Debunking Wagging the Moondoggie, Part I“:
First, why “debunk” rather than simply engage in dialogue, or more importantly, “rebut”? The origins of the word “debunk” explain the need for its use rather than to engage in civil and non-offputting dialogue. It is an enabling device for the “debunker” to assume a haughty, superior and condescending stance in order to establish a statuesque appearance of speaking with great authority. “Debunking” is said to arise as a means to “…expose false or nonsensical claims or sentiments.” Essential to this effort is framing, as to have a civil dialogue among persons when one is spouting nonsense, the other not, is not productive. Ergo, Dave McGowan’s debunking of the alleged Moon shots had to be shot down, and in the most aggressive language possible, crude, condescending, and venomous.
Secondly, it speaks to McGowan himself, asking why he does not simply debunk the debunkers. Oh, he’s dead, they say. He supposedly died on November 22, 2015. Prior to that time he was said to have been a chain smoker, so that lung cancer naturally got him. In a televised interview, a strange one in which he wore a bathrobe, he smoked cigarette after cigarette, so that when he faked his death, witnesses could easily and smugly say “Oh, yeah, saw that coming.” Such behavior on McGowan’s part is called “predictive programming.:
If McGowan is still alive, and I think he is, he would be 62 years old. In fact, in past people searches, there was indeed a Dave living in LA, alive and well and the correct age. Now he is gone. Maybe he died for real, but more likely Intel merely altered the public record so that people like me cannot so easily debunk fake deaths. I suspect Dave, a limited hangout guy and mostly likely CIA, still lives and breathes. His website, “Center for an informed America” (get it, CIA?) is still up and running. Some time back when I was on Facebook, I suggested to one of Dave’s kids that daddy was still alive and kicking. I lasted all of ten minutes before being banned.
Debunking Wagging the Moondoggie comes from a site called “Sensiblesite,” having 73 members and out to “debunk” every major fraud and crime against intelligence of recent years, including those who doubt the validity of vaccines, Moon landings, and climate change. It is run be persons either stupid, or paid to be stupid, more likely the latter.
On to the meat of the debunking: That the Moon landings were real, and a magnificent technological achievement. I tend to think of the Moon landings as a cover story, nothing more, behind which something more pertinent and sinister was going on, weaponization of space. But I will leave that for another day. These days we have to deal with people who claim that space travel is impossible and there are are no rockets out there, just hot air … balloons. I am on the fence on that matter, and will stay there, as LOE, or low-earth orbit is not “space,” and enough atmosphere exists there to make propulsion and travel something achievable.
There is contained within Debunking quite a bit of what was coined during the Star Trek series of the 1960s as “technobabble.” Thus do we find long-winded explanations for NASA’s destruction of the electronic record of the Moon shots, kept on video tape. It seems only logical that if the landings never happened, than any record of their being real would have to be submerged in shady tactics to make it appear as though they were real but had to be destroyed for other purposes. Thus do we get this:
The reason NASA eventually reused the original tapes is that it suffered a tape shortage in the early 1980s. An internal report in 1981 noted “Landsat magnetic tape requirements have increased substantially… Recent increases of 10 reels per day for DOMSAT and 50 per day by the Image Processing Facility have severely strained both new and recertified tape supply systems.” Tens of thousands of boxes of tapes were reused. Reusing old tapes was preferred as the old tapes were manufactured using whale oil … which had since been banned, and newer tapes made using synthetic oil did not meet quality specifications, being more prone to degradation. NASA would have found it very difficult to carry out any of its missions at the time without reusing the tapes in its archives.
I think it highly pertinent here that whale oil was in use in 1969 to make magnetic tape, as it hearkens back to a time when whale oil was used for heating and lighting … primitive times in terms of existing technology. McGowan maintains that the technology to go to the Moon did not exist, and so had to be faked. Thus was carried out a public hoax that would be meant to last even in the face of immense skepticism well into the next century.
Sensiblesite is run by unnamed authors, most likely working out of a basement in Langley, VA, but possibly out of some garage or basement by college-age geeks. They tip their hand in the following paragraph:
McGowan makes the point that modern astronauts travel much smaller distances than the Apollo astronauts travelled, as if this proved that travelling further must be impossible. All it actually prove is that NASA has been concentrating on things other than the Moon since the Apollo era. As discussed earlier, the Moon landings were primarily symbolic. Once they were over NASA was able to turn its attention to less expensive, more practical, and more scientifically beneficial projects, which is why it started work on the space shuttle, with the intention of establishing a space station (now the International Space Station). The idea of the space shuttle was that it would bring down the cost of reaching space by being reusable and flying on a regular basis. Without the distorting influence of the desire to beat Russia to the Moon, crewed space exploration reverted to the course it would probably have followed had the Cold War not happened, concentrating on the far more easily-accessible environment closer to the Earth.
[Note: Spelling of “travelling” with two ‘l’s is a British habit.] This is the entirety of the justification for spending a quarter of a trillion 2019 dollars on what amounts to a high school prom, the desire to look good and to beat the Russians. Such logic does not translate well into government affairs at high level. Russia to this day has been played as a bad guy, and that allows for propaganda of a high order to take place. Mary Bennett and David Percy (Dark Moon), before they go off the rails on pyramids and Mars objectives, solidly demonstrate that two programs worked hand-in-hand, one of real technology feats (Russia) and one of showy publicity (USA) to achieve a common goal, space technology to be used for unstated purposes. The cost was enormous, and so had to be disguised as something else, pointless Moon landings, in order to conceal its true purpose.
Now comes the time when the pointlessness of Apollo has to be shown to be virtuous and justified, and so Sensiblesite drags out Russia and the Cold War, with Americans needing to show their superiority over their (fake) enemy.
Here’s a telling paragraph from the end of the Debunking piece:
McGowan is clearly a complete stranger to the physics of spaceflight and has obviously not done even a moment’s research on the topic, and yet he still feels entitled to speak authoritatively on the matter, gainsaying well-established science and trusting his readers won’t be any better informed than he is.
As I like to explain in maintaining a successful marriage, it is not wise ever to point a finger at a spouse, as cupped under the hand with the pointed finger are three fingers pointed back, which I call the “loaded gun.” Those fingers will go off one by one, each finding their mark. Sensiblesite makes this mistake, as it is obvious that they do not give their readers credit for being any better able to sniff out a hoax than they are. Its readers are no more well-informed than its writers.
I read McGowan’s Moondoggie series way back when Dave was still said to be alive, and found it completely credible, possibly written in the same basements or garages as a Sensiblesite’s work. At the time I did not grasp the concept of “limited hangout,” which was a McGowan specialty (see Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon for a similar treatment of 1960s-70s music and musicians). The point of a “limited hangout” is to allow certain things to be exposed while at the same time preserving secrecy in much more well-guarded matters. McGowan was allowed to expose Apollo with the understanding that while the Moon landings were faked, much more important objectives were achieved in secrecy behind that façade.
Sensiblesite continues the work, attempting to preserve the Moon hoax while preserving much larger secrets. If you want a sensible and well-written record of the illogical and nonsensical claims about Moon Landings, I suggest you read McGowan’s Moondoggie series. It is long and involved. Not many people have the ability to process long piece like that, but I assume our readers here are capable.
Piece of Mindful 
What was the limited-hangout spin of Dave’s Laurel Canyon work?
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He exposed military connections and the lack of musical talent, but did not question the deaths of any of the 50-60 musicians and movie stars who supposedly died in that era. We found quite a few of them alive, including Janis Joplin.
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Awesome. I’ll go look for those posts of yours…!
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Our most reliable indicator was the Social Security Death Index, where we found Sharon Tate with a hinky Social Security number, since removed, and Ricky Nelson. No others that I recall. SSDI is not a perfect source, but of 60 dead rockers, there ought to be more than one entry.
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Mark –
Any thoughts on the toxic airborne event in Ohio? I’m reading (unsourced) that the movie White Noise was recently filmed in the same exact town, using locals as extras. It concerns a similar type of incident.
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Just reading up on it.
Any thoughts on Chinese balloons?
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These are my thoughts on it, posted on OffG article:
https://off-guardian.org/2023/02/05/offg-on-the-chinese-spy-balloon/
My first question is: how do they know it was Chinese? Did the Chinese tell them or did they find out another way?
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_China_balloon_incident”
So supposedly it sailed over “one of America’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base” in Montana. The US has alleged nuclear capability and all other kinds of military weaponry and expertise but it has to shoot down a balloon rather than simply capture it in order to perform an analysis.
The “downing”
“According to the U.S. military, the balloon was successfully shot down by a single AIM-9X air-to-air missile, fired from a F-22 Raptor off the coast of Surfside Beach, South Carolina, at 2:39 PM local time.[34] The shootdown was the first kill recorded by an F-22 aircraft, and was speculated to be the highest-altitude air-to-air kill in history.[b][35]
Debris recovery
The debris from the balloon was dispersed over an area of seven square miles (18 square kilometers), and collection efforts were initiated for further inspection.[36]”
I wonder what the collection efforts will reveal.
Could they make it more obvious that this is really just an exercise?
And what could make it clearer that at the top they’re all in it together?
These are two different recordings of the alleged shootdown. Do they match?
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_balloon_fall.webm”
“https://reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10tp8j7/the_chinese_balloon_shot_down”
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If the purpose of misdirection is to get you to “look here, not there”, then why are you not “looking there”? Just as with the NASA moon landing tapes disappearing, can you for one second imagine they did not disappear because they never existed? I do not know what is up with Chinese balloons other that it seems like misdirection.
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I’m confused. Do you think that tapes were erased because they clearly showed fakery or that the supposed erased tapes never actually existed? Either way we have no clear evidence but we do have evidence – purported at least – of going to the moon and that’s what needs to be addressed not the possibility of tapes showing fakery or tapes supposedly never existing.
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That is deflection. If the tapes did not exist, then there were no moon landings. Do not deflect.
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whale oil was in use in 1969 to make videotape…yet they had tech to goto the moon..okay got it.
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If your method of analysis is “It’s absurd to believe X if Y,” then fine judge by that method. That isn’t the way I judge. In my book, where it exists, evidence is king. What does the evidence say? According to my analysis the evidence – a considerable amount of which exists – 100% corresponds with expectations considering the lunar conditions and I haven’t seen any credible debunking of our ability to get to moon, only perfectly reasonable explanations as far as I can follow them and perfectly good refutations of any attempts at debunking.
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In googling for “whale oil + tapes” I stumbled upon the “Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC)“
https://www.arsc-audio.org/index.php
The ARSC maintains a Discussion List (ARSCLIST), that is “an unmoderated mail reflector to facilitate the exchange of information on sound archives and promote communication among those interested in preserving, documenting, and making accessible the history of recorded sound. The list is sponsored by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) as a service to ARSC members and the archival community at large.”
https://cool.culturalheritage.org/byform/mailing-lists/arsclist/
In the 2008 mail archive (“Sticky AGFA PEM 469” thread) there’s one Charles Richardson that, among other things, explains how his new patented Rezerex restoration process “safely restores the magnetic tape to almost original condition and extends its lifespan for a great many years.”.
In replying to a contributor who brought up the topic of the use of whale oil in magnetic tapes he writes:
“Whale oil is a good mechanical lubricant and is used in oiling precision mechanisms such as watches and clocks, BUT IT WAS NEVER USED AS A BINDER LUBRICANT IN TAPE MANUFACTURE. Chemical Engineering has synthesized whale oil so as to reduce the demand for natural whale oil. There may be an after market lubricant based on either natural or synthetic whale oil which some use in attempting to “re-lubricate” a tape that has squealing problems. It is a very limited band aide short term remedy which is not approved by chemists as safe.”
Searching for Rezerex, it turns out this Charles Richardson looks like one that knows what he’s talking about:
“Charles A. Richardson has for nearly half a century been a recording engineer in the mid-Atlantic region, and for more than thirty years he has been a member of AES, SMPTE and ARSC. He was an invited speaker for the AES New York section’s program on tape problems, and made a presentation to the ARSC National Convention on tape issues. AES Preprint 6969 has published his research on Sticky Shed Syndrome as it effects magnetic tape.
Known as an unusually resourceful engineer and an inveterate tinkerer, Charlie has independently investigated the “Sticky Shed Syndrome” problem.
He has discovered the conditions and processes which cause magnetic tapes to develop Sticky Shed Syndrome. His discoveries led him to invent a new process which safely removes and eliminates sticky shed debris from magnetic audio and video tapes. An independent chemical laboratory has verified his discoveries and confirmed that his restoration process is safe and effective.
The U. S. Patent Office, recognizing that his restoration process is new, original and effective, has issued a patent. His Rezerex process, unlike baking or various oxide chemical treatments, safely restores tapes so that they may played back repeatedly, at any time without further processing or problems, and with high levels of sonic, magnetic and mechanical performance each time.”
https://richardsonrecords.com/About_Us.html
Make of it what you folks will.
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It is really simple, and classic misdirection. Remember that governments do not lie so much as misdirect … “Look here, not there.” If there were no moon landings, there would be no magnetic tape records. Rather than making up excuses for keeping such nonexistent records classified, government heads got together and concocted a story where the tapes were reused due to some made up reason … they came up with whale oil having gone in short supply, there being a tape shortage, and anyway, the information on the tapes could not be converted to modern media.
I think it is very clever. These NASA people are very good liars.
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So let’s say whale oil had nothing to do with it, it makes absolutely no difference the reason they decided to reuse the tapes unless the theory that McGowan suggests or some other incriminating reason can be shown to have validity. Currently, it can’t and the theory that McGowan provides has zero merit even as a theory. The thing is there is masses of evidence to look at so the absence of some evidence really doesn’t matter. Unless we were very keen Apollo enthusiasts we’d have no clue about this missing evidence unless it was advertised.
“McGowan then turns his attention to NASA’s loss of a large number of tapes of data sent to Earth during Apollo 11. McGowan’s theory is that the footage of astronauts in the low-gravity environment of the moon was created simply by playing back footage filmed on Earth at half the normal speed. He suggests that NASA cannot supply the original tapes because they contained the incriminating full-speed footage and were therefore destroyed. “If the broadcast tapes are played back at roughly twice their normal running speed,” he says, “the astronauts appear to move about in ways entirely consistent with the way ordinary humans move about right here on planet Earth.” He fails to link to any video demonstrating his point, but this double-speed video of astronauts on the moon shows his claim to be false. The movement of the astronauts at this speed looks clearly absurd.”
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Mark calls me lazy. I cannot reject that accusation but if we were to use a more complimentary epithet we could say efficient instead. I don’t go looking down rabbit holes where whatever I turn up with will have no chance of being solid material for my case. You will not find anything going down the “what was on those tapes that were reused/never existed” rabbit hole. If there was something there it would have been found and there’s simply too much footage for it to make sense that the missing tapes show stuff exposing the moon landings as a hoax.
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And why not just transfer the content to digital, before reusing the tapes? First commercial CD’s date back to 1982, but digital storage technology should have been available to NASA even well before.
Was that too clever, or not worthy of the expense, for NASA?
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If the tapes did not exist, if NASA is just lying, then it all makes perfect sense.
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Did you read the debunking?
“The preservation of the Apollo tapes was not considered important, since, as noted by retired NASA engineer Richard Nafzger, “The technology didn’t exist to do anything with them other than what was already done at the time they were made.” The television pictures which were broadcast at the time of the mission and recorded by television stations around the world were considered to be sufficient for any purpose which could be required of them. The idea that the pictures on the original tapes might be digitised at a higher quality for playback on high-definition televisions would not have occurred to anyone in a world where such technology was decades away from existing.”
You can reject that reason but you don’t have clear evidence of what happened to the tapes so you have nothing to really argue with, all you have – if you don’t accept the reason – is your lack of belief in it which is subjective. I’m only interested in what I can put forward objectively. What I believe is of no importance in an argument but I tend to find that moon hoaxers (especially my sister, for example) seem to think that what they believe and don’t believe counts more than what can be presented objectively.
We have to stick to the unarguable facts not what we believe and don’t believe.
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Ever crossed your mind that your sister might be the smart one?
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I disagree with Petra, but if I were on the fence, I’d be much more persuaded by her than you, Mark, if for no other reason than that she never indulges in the ad hominem attacks and hostile tone that you can’t seem to shake.
You suggest Petra is a “lazy-ass.” Frankly, after reading the Sensiblesite article, I was disappointed by the laziness of your debunking of the debunking. One of the obvious strengths in the SS article is its takedown of McGowan’s unscientific assumptions about the amount of fuel needed to get to the moon. SS claims every drop of fuel used is accounted for and is a matter of public record. These are tangible, intelligent arguments that you completely ignore, instead shifting to arguments about the phoniness of the US/Russia rivalry that you have covered many times, and that is entirely beside the very specific point of McGowan’s apparently ignorant (or intentionally dishonest) characterization of fuel requirements.
SS also claims that the tapes and other documents were disappeared or destroyed because the data on them, or lack thereof, would have betrayed the hoax. But SS says all the data on the tapes was transcribed and is freely available. Since that’s the glaringly obvious headline, it seems incredibly lazy to “debunk” this point by rambling in circles about whale oil or whatever.
Another bombshell: McGowan and others have used a Werner Von Braun quote to claim that he believed traveling to the moon was impossible. SS says the quote is taken out of context and ignores the very next paragraph in the document it comes from. Have you read the next paragraph? The entire document? I haven’t, which is why I wouldn’t have the gall to call Petra a “lazy-ass.”
You concede that McGowan was likely a limited hangout, then treat his Moondoggie article like gospel truth and deride Petra for rejecting it. I think it’s obvious that McGowan, like MM, sprinkles revelations of truth with wooly-headed but smugly certain nonsense that’s as absurd as mainstream propaganda and has the same thought-killing, cognitive-dissonance-invoking effect as mainstream news does. Though I disagree about the moon landings, I applaud her for questioning conspiracist dogma.
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I do not know why your comment went to moderation, not done by me.
I do not criticize Petra for disagreeing with McGowan, but for putting up the false front of having read his work when she has not. This has been my problem all along, the phoniness of it all. Why not just sit down and read it? It can only be either laziness or the inability to read long volumes of work that she not predisposed to agree with. I’ve been writing and researching a long time, and have encountered this trait countless times. It is part of the human framework. Sitting down and reading and flagging the “debunking” of McGowan was work and took effort, as I thought at the outset that it was nonsense. That they used the Cold War as the main reason for actually going to the Moon all those times … I’ve long known the Cold War was bunkum, that its purpose was to create a propaganda shield for other activities, but to see it used yet again in 2019 for that purpose disgusted me. So I focused on that aspect and the tapes. Want me to deal with the rest? Not satisfied? I thought it enough.
I have never dealt with the WVB quote, as I knew him as well be a LHO, just as I knew that Van Allen conveniently changed his mind about radiation after the hoax, as he needed to make a living. But saying that a moon journey requiring a rocket the size of the Empire State Building (the WTCs were not yet built) was negated by staging strains credulity. That they can account for fuel on a nonexistent journey?They have paid liars for every aspect of the hoax, including the nonexistence (not disappearance) of the magnetic tapes.
Petra inadvertently conceded she had never read McGowan. I called her out on it. You want me to be kinder, gentler? Then get her to fess up openly. Enough is enough.
McGowan, treating him as gospel? Do you read my work? But a LHO is not the same as a lie. He was given access to classified material … maybe he wrote what we read, maybe not, as he was cancelled in 2015 (11/22 = 33 by the way). He is not the end, but merely the means to an end, and did not act independently. He was an agent for another purpose, but as with all LHOs, take what is good, discard the rest.
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Petra has said she has read McGowan. If I recall correctly, you latched onto a comment where she said something like “I don’t need to read McGowan to understand… (whatever her point was).” She was reacting to your insistence that reading the McGowan article would clear something up, and she was saying her understanding of the point went beyond McGowan, and you twisted her words to make it sound like she was “admitting” she hadn’t read him at all. You are mistaken about this supposed “inadvertent” admission, but you won’t hear it.
But if someone who believed in the moon landings has read McGowan, would that make any difference? Would it make you more inclined to address their arguments in a rational way? It seems not. McGowan falsely claims that NASA has not accounted for fuel on the journey to and from the moon and uses this false claim to support his argument than the moon landings didn’t happen. You retort that this isn’t worth responding to because the moon journey didn’t happen so who cares if they accounted for fuel. McGowan’s evidence was effectively debunked, and your response is, “I don’t care about that evidence because I know I’m right.” This is not intelligent debate and it is not debunking.
WVB was a limited hangout? Huh? He was the Nazi head of NASA, and the document, if I recall correctly, was an internal NASA document written well before the moon landing story, which means it had nothing to do with limited hangouts.
It seems obvious your mind is made up, and you’re really not interested in having the evidence for your conclusions challenged. That’s fine. Why not just say so instead of pretending to engage in a serious debate about evidence for and against your conclusions?
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Also, though I don’t understand your characterization of WVB as a LHO, I find it maddening that you excuse yourself for “not dealing with” the WVB quote because you knew he was a LHO, even as you insist that Petra must deal with McGowan who you also know is a LHO but we take what’s good and leave the rest… Oh my God. This is what you call intelligent debate?
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I only insisted that Petra read McGowan before laying into his work
For myself, I do not know when I stopped believing that we went to the moon, but know it was before McGowan. There were other works, and I know I spent hours poring over photos and read several books on the subject, so you might say that McGowan is derivative.
I know that WVB made a trip to Antarctica to pick up moon rocks. His comment about the size rocket needed to get to the moon was made in the 1950s, I suspect before it was decided that a Moon mission would be faked. Then be became a player.
As to what I choose to believe and not, it’s a matter of judgment. I do not believe the Cold War was real, and from there we have to move on to what purpose was served by such a massive propaganda campaign. I do not believe we set foot on the moon, and so ask the logical question, why such a massive propaganda campaign. What are they hiding from us? That’s why I introduced this piece by suggesting space weaponry was in the works at that time, including installing a massive spy apparatus out there. Unmanned, but in need of some finishing touches and occasional repairs. Ergo the Space Shuttle program.
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Moon landing proves earth is a ball.
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I’m closer with you on all that than I am to Petra. You might even agree with my open-mindedness on the idea that the work and research at that time could have involved space travel, and hell, maybe even a trip to the moon, but that the public version of why it was done, how it was done, and what was accomplished is balderdash. With JFK, the public was herded into different thought camps–he was killed by Oswald, he was killed by the Mafia or the CIA–but nobody was supposed to think he wasn’t killed at all. With the moon landings, the public can think they were real, or the public can think they weren’t real–our leaders obviously couldn’t care less– but, as with JFK and so many other hoaxes, there may exist a truth that none of us have come close to guessing. This is why dogmatic pronouncements and belligerent claims to “know” the mission was real or wasn’t real rankle me. It sounds no different to me than people who “know” 911 is real or that vaccines are safe and effective. Those of us outside the mainstream are just as susceptible to, and often guilty of, dogmatic close-minded ignorance as those people that some of (not me) like to call “sheep.”
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I very much appreciate your sane argument and support, Scott, but I’m curious to know – why don’t you believe the moon landings were real?
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Petra, for the reasons mentioned above, at this point, I see no value in committing to a “belief” about it. What I have is a healthy skepticism of all big stories in current news and history. I used to “believe” the moon landings were fake, but the “conspiracy” angle on this that gets played in “alternative” media and books feels as spooky to me as the various “alternative” theories about the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, 911, and Covid. I cannot prove this or argue it intellectually (I’m an intelligent non-intellectual I guess), but as with other big events that have been cultural and political game-changers nationally and/or globally, the moon landing debate seems to be controlled on both sides–the mainstream side and on the “conspiracy” side–with people on both sides latching onto thin arguments that are riddled with logical landmines that they shout over while hopping from one to another. It’s more or less the same absurd song-and-dance I see playing out with Covid, and it makes me think we’re all missing something. And the more we cling to whatever the hell our “belief” is, the less likely it is that we’ll figure out anything. Unless, you know, we want to wait for another limited hangout to spell it out for us like Miles Mathis did with the Manson murders and the 60s assassinations. Maybe when Langley decides to create a new limited hangout leader, the “truth” about the moon landings will be his or her hook, and we’ll all slap our hands to our foreheads and go of course!–and for a while we’ll regurgitate that person’s viewpoint as we argue with people regurgitating Anderson Cooper’s and Tucker Carlson’s and whoever-else’s viewpoint and, you, know, the beat goes on…
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…or… maybe the new conspiracy thought leader who replaces Mathis will blow our minds with completely different revelations and then mention, in passing, whatever shell game McGowan was playing with Moondoggie the way Mathis mentioned the shell game of McGowan’s Laurel Canyon series, which will further help Mark delineate which parts of his work to “keep” and which parts to “leave.” Let’s face it, we’re all pretending to have intellectual debates about “beliefs,” which is as absurd to do about historical or current events topics as it is to do about religion. We don’t have much choice, since we are drowning in a world of information overload where so much of the information is unreliable at best, and intentionally crafted bullshit at worst. Talking about it–debating about it–arguing about it is worthwhile, but only, in my opinion, if the arguments are made with humility. If you are not coming from a place of humility when arguing beliefs, you’re just a blowhard, as far as I’m concerned.
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Given there’s valuable good sense in your reasoning, I would be tempted to call that mindset “intellectual nihilism”. I also strongly suspect that’s precisely the mindset they want us to have: “Too much confusion here, I think I better give up trying to make heads or tails of the whole mess”.
I read WMD many years ago. At the time I hadn’t yet looked seriously into the moon landings saga, and sure enough it was an eye opener. The kind of reading that indeed makes one slap his forehead saying “of course”. I still think McGowan is basically telling the truth, but he also leaves along the way, intentionally I think, weak spots and blatant errors ready to be attacked and exposed by the Sensiblesite or Attivissimo of the day. After all, isn’t that exactly the purpose of a LH, giving you an alternative view, but also getting you to beat the wrong bushes and asking the wrong questions?
Today I’m light years ahead of it, because I know how propulsion works, and I also know any honest physicist would laugh at the idea of getting propulsion from a free expanding gas. But physics has been deeply corrupted long ago, just like much of the other sciences, so that they can shamelessly keep teaching absurdities the likes of Einstein relativity, darwinism and virology, let alone climate change.
Hence I don’t need to care what McGowan or others say, to know the moon (or mars, or jupiter) landings was and will always be impossible. I see all this endless debating about a plethora of irrelevant issues like proper shadows, tinfoils modules, video anomalies and so on and so forth, just a diversion, and more importantly a way to annoy and confuse, so that the vast majority of people after a shortwhile just run away out of boredom.
The point I’m trying to make is basically that we are indeed inundated with truckloads of information, but we also should learn that not all the information should be given the same weight.
Should I give you the exact location of a river in a remote jungle of Papua where I swear the water flows uphill, and I even provide you with photographic and video evidence, would you invest your time inquiring about my credentials, about the correctness of the shadows in the videos, or checking if the name of the river is rightly spelled, and other minutiae? Would you decide to take a very long and expensive trip to that remote location to see with your eyes if I told you the truth?
Or would you simply dismiss the whole story because you KNOW that gravity DICTATES that water flowing uphill is an impossibility?
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I’m waiting for one – just one – clear piece of evidence – not smoke’n’mirrors derided improbabilities or simple BS – but a clear piece of evidence against the moon landings in WMD.
And if no one can provide one – just one – what does that say? A whole 14 chapters and not one piece of clear evidence against the moon landings?
“Today I’m light years ahead of it, because I know how propulsion works, and I also know any honest physicist would laugh at the idea of getting propulsion from a free expanding gas.”
Have you argued out your understanding of how propulsion works with any of the space enthusiasts/engineers on Quora or elsewhere?
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Yes, and it goes something like this:
Me
“During a free expansion the internal energy of the gas doesn’t change. That implies in a free expansion no force is involved. If no force (action) is involved, according to Newton 3 no reaction will take place”
The engineer
“Totally correct, but in a rocket there’s not a free expansion. Free expansion has nothing to do with rockets”
Me
“Why not?”
The engineer
“Because I say so, and because otherwise we couldn’t have get to the moon. Wait, or aren’t you one of those ignorant conspiracy nuts? Ha ha, hey folks there’s another one, ha ha, uh uh oh oh”
Case closed
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Vacuum needs PERFECT CLEAN SEAL to hold vacuum, they use special 1 time use copper gaskets just to keep higher level vacuum. A specialist in vacuums said that it is ridiculous to thin that the dirt covered astro liars would be able to reenter the lunacy lander and then close a vacuum tight seal. He literally laughed at the idea.
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Let’s leave the gas thing aside for the moment and return to WTM.
“I still think McGowan is basically telling the truth, but he also leaves along the way, intentionally I think, weak spots and blatant errors ready to be attacked and exposed by the Sensiblesite or Attivissimo of the day.”
What I put to you is that Dave McGowan is/was an agent whose purpose is to mislead those of a skeptical-of-authorities nature in order to turn them into Boys-Who-Cried-Wolf and that WTM is entirely a work of propaganda from start to finish.
Of course, the way to disprove this claim is to provide one compelling item in this bible that debunks the moon landings. Can somebody – anybody – please provide one thing – just one – that clearly debunks the moon landings in WTM.
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You should read him and find that “one” thing for yourself. I am done here.
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AK, very well done. Understanding how the principle of Free Expansion of Gas into the Vacuum disproves Space Travel places you in the top 1%. The idea of Rockets working in a vacuum was claimed by Goddard in 1915 but he never wrote a paper describing how it worked or provided the instructions for a repeatable experiment that confirmed it. In fact, nobody has been able to repeat his experiment even though many, including the U.S. Air Force, have tried, and failed. NASA won’t even try it. They have a 50 foot vacuum chamber, yet won’t attempt flight inside of it. Same with shows like Mythbusters who do spots on “debunking” Moon Landing conspiracies but never touch flight inside a vacuum. On the subject of Free Expansion and why gas does not produce a force when introduced into a vacuum there are several papers published in respected academic journals (e.g. Joule, Peter Fireman, Journal of Physical Chemistry) up until the late 50’s when all research into the subject stops. Not even Miles Mathis, the self-proclaimed Mr. Science himself, addresses Free Expansion. If you follow this path you’ll find that science and technology has been purposely stalled since the end of WWI. What we see as progress is really subtle improvements on things we already had and not completely new ideas. Not even AI. But that’s another discussion for another time.
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Thank you very much Boethius, it’s refreshing to find at last someone on the same boat.
I know very well science has been corrupted long ago, including those regarded as “hard”, like physics.
Yes NASA and all the other space clowns are very well aware that Joule’s free expansion is to space travels what a silver bullet is to a vampire: it kills it instantly.
They also know that the vast majority of scientists are mostly interested in their career and paychecks, so very few would dare stepping outside the allowed path, and the few could be easily marginalized and ridiculed. It’s business as usual.
As far as the average Joe is concerned, the idea of blasting an impressive amount of fire and smoke from one end and getting zilch movement to the other is so counterintuitive that it seems preposterous. We live all of our life into a pressurized world, all the actions and object’s behaviour we know are somehow affected by pressure, so that the whole thing is deeply ingrained in our mind. The notion of a vacuum is totally strange to us.
That’s why they can easily convince everyone how a rocket works in a vacuum using totally misleading examples like wheelchairs and medicine balls, machine gun, or other incarnations of the same wrong concept, the fact is they are all consistent with our everyday experience.
Much harder is trying to explain that in the classic and abused wheelchair-medicine ball example, the ball doesn’t represent the exhaust exiting the rocket, it represent the air resistance, while the correct analogy for the exhaust is the man throwing the ball, so that moving a rocket in a vacuum is like sitting in a wheelchair without any ball to throw. Good luck propelling yourself (of course you can find another way to roll the chair on the floor, but in space there’s no floor).
It’s nothing more than a very simple but clever card trick played under our eyes, but nobody can see through it.
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The e-mail I just received said that I am able to post a reply-comment via a reply to that same e-mail message. First try.
To Boethius, I too thank you… I could not have said it better – and have failed before.
AK, Boethius and others: I would qualify the “rocketry does not work in a vacuum” with the commonly held belief in what is shown as burning fuel of some type.
I have ZERO evidence, but since we have been lied to forever, and our “scientists” (especially within academia) don’t seem to be all that bright, is it not possible for the existence of other means of propulsion – unknown to us commoner’s?
I was also looking into, as many smarter than I have, the materials needed to withstand any venture into the purported vacuum of “space.” Projectile probes and such. Common numbers range from -250°C to +250°C, which I suppose could be lies as well for the temperatures out there. Those both seem very weak extremes to me. Anyway, if true, Ti-Al alloys seem to be able to work at either end of that claimed spectrum. But both ends in a matter of seconds at the transition from sunlit to shadowed (by whatever) while out there?
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So expelling tons of mass in the form of fuel and gas at high velocity does NOT create a force in the opposite direction, vacuum or not? Where did you take your physics lessons, at CF? You need to go back and try to think it over one more time, thoroughly.
FYI, there are quite a few military aircrafts capable of flying at high altitudes; in excess of 100k feet. For the sake of conversation, here’s the Eurofighter Typhoon’s specs: its ceiling is at 65000 feet or 19800 meters. At that altitude and temperature, the air pressure is cca. 0.03 bar. That’s approximately 1/33 of the pressure at sea level, yet they can propel AND steer the airplane around up there. According to you reasoning, such planes have an impossible feature of defying physical laws since their engines should be working with 1/33rd of their sea level thrust at their ceiling, making it absolutely impossible to get an airplane that high up. Yet there they are. Magick?
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AK, wonderful comment. “Intellectual nihilism” is a fair way to sum up what I said. It’s also something I resist, in part because I believe, as you said, it’s exactly what the elite creators of this relentless crazymaking nonsense want, but mostly because it’s really just not in my nature. I think of myself as a romantic and an idealist. People like me often degenerate into bitter cynics as we get older, but I refuse to give in to that cliche. ha.
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“Another bombshell: McGowan and others have used a Werner Von Braun quote to claim that he believed traveling to the moon was impossible. SS says the quote is taken out of context and ignores the very next paragraph in the document it comes from.”
As I already said, I don’t need to care what McGowan says to know the moon landings were faked, anyway, I like doing my homework, and I wasted fifteen minutes of my precious life looking into that preposterous Von Braun’s piece of science fiction (Conquest of the Moon).
Von Braun as quoted by McGowan:
“It is commonly believed that man will fly directly from the earth to the moon, but to do this, we would require a vehicle of such gigantic proportions that it would prove an economic impossibility. It would have to develop sufficient speed to penetrate the atmosphere and overcome the earth’s gravity and, having traveled all the way to the moon, it must still have enough fuel to land safely and make the return trip to earth. Furthermore, in order to give the expedition a margin of safety, we would not use one ship alone, but a minimum of three … each rocket ship would be taller than New York’s Empire State Building [almost ¼ mile high] and weigh about ten times the tonnage of the Queen Mary, or some 800,000 tons.”
Contrary to what SensibleGuy implies in his debunking, Von Braun in his book never talks of flying directly from the earth to the moon, either in a single or multi stages rocket. His entire idea revolves around the building of an earth orbital space station that would function as a stepping stone to the moon, and without which he thinks it would be impossible to go to the moon.
Curiously enough this is even plainly admitted by SensibleGuy himself as he writes:
“McGowan seems unaware that Von Braun was talking about a single monolithic rocket flying from Earth to the moon and back. VON BRAUN POINT WAS THAT THIS SINGLE-STAGE CONCEPT WAS IMPRACTICAL AND THAT A LUNAR LANDING WOULD INVOLVE MULTIPLE STAGES, AN IDEA WHICH HE INTRODUCED IN THE PARAGRAPH FOLLOWING THE ONE QUOTED BY MCGOWAN, WHERE HE SUGGESTS THAT A SPACE STATION COULD BE USED AS A STAGING POINT. But McGowan must have stopped reading before he reached that part as he clearly believes von Braun’s quote about the impracticality of a single-stage rocket is somehow relevant to the Apollo missions, which used multi-stage rockets carrying detachable lunar modules.”
And here is infact von Braun “missing” next paragraph:
“From the space station’s orbit, however, a journey to the moon becomes feasible. In the orbit we can construct the type of vehicles we require for the lunar trip, in the same way that we can build the space station. These vehicles will already have a speed of 15,840 miles per hour—the speed of the space station as it moves around the earth. Since we have this running start, we will not need excessive amounts of propellants or very powerful rocket motors to take the lunar vehicles to their destination.”
I hope it will be obvious to anyone how this SensibleGuy is either stupid or lying through his teeth (the latter), hoping that no one will bother noticing the difference between two totally different concepts like multi stages rockets and staging points.
Von Braun in the book only refers to multi stages rockets where he talks about reaching the earth orbiting station:
“To reach the 2-hour orbit, we’ll use slender, streamlined rocket ships capable of breaking through the earth’s retarding atmosphere and attaining a top speed of 18,468 miles per hour. For this purpose vehicles called threestage rocket ships, because they consist actually of three rockets, each with its own motors and fuel tanks, will be employed. The winged third stage, or top section, is the actual spaceship. Each ship will stand as high as a twentyfour-story building, weigh 7,000 tons at take-off, and, besides crew and passengers, will carry 36 tons of cargo.”
To recap:
1) As correctly reported by McGowan, and intentionally obfuscated by SensibleGuy, it’s true Von Braun believed that flying directly to the moon, i.e. without using an orbital station as a staging point, would be impossible, regardless of using single or multi stage rockets.
2) according to Von Braun, just getting from the Earth to the orbital station would require a ship that “will stand as high as a twentyfour-story building, and weigh 7,000 tons at take-off”.
3) According to the narrative, NASA managed to fly directly to the moon using a 3,000 tons rocket.
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I’m afraid I’m not seeing a debunking here, Mark.
The Sensiblesite post puts forward a reason for the reuse of tapes. What’s wrong with it? In any case though what I’d say in the first instance is that what is “debunked” by the SS post could never count as evidence against the moon landings in the first place. Without clear evidence of what was in the reused tapes all we have is a seeming anomaly that cannot prove anything regardless of whether we can find a reasonable explanation for the reuse of the tapes or not.
An eye-watering sum of money spent on something that doesn’t seem worth it is not really evidence either, it’s just a seeming anomaly. Look at all the money spent on the absolutely worthless jab that provides only serious risk with zero benefit.
There is simply no attempt by you to debunk the third quote from the SS post.
To my mind what is addressed in Wagging the Moondoggie by the SS post tends to be all “soft” argument which doesn’t address the actual evidence, however, the SS poster has debunked American Moon in two parts where the actual evidence for going to the moon is much more in question.
“https://www.reddit.com/r/SensibleSite/comments/eqfeqs/debunking_american_moon”
“https://www.reddit.com/r/SensibleSite/comments/i1rkbp/debunking_american_moon_part_2”
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see above.If the tapes never existed then a reason for their disappearance was needed.Whale oil, indeed.
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But why couldn’t whale oil have been used and its substitute unsuitable? Improbable things happen but in any case, the absence of tapes is simply immaterial. There’s so much actual purported evidence to deal with – absence or non-existence of tapes for whatever reason simply doesn’t signify.
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Cover story.
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OK, so Sensiblesite guy – wish he’d say his name – has also “debunked” what the book, Dissolving Illusions, says about the smallpox vaccination. While, in fact, I agree that a certain sloppiness is shown by the authors we all know what a scam vaccination in general is and that the alleged vaccination didn’t eradicate smallpox … however, I had no clue what a scam the alleged disease smallpox itself is – just like covid – and now I realise all alleged pandemics/epidemics such as the plague, etc.
“https://www.reddit.com/r/SensibleSite/comments/j05yvs/debunking_the_antivaxxers_distortions_in/”
Before responding last night to SS guy’s Dissolving Illusions post I looked up smallpox and found this amazing video by a Russian naturopath, Katerina Sugak, who shows the fraudulent history of smallpox as a distinctive disease and quite a bit more. I’ve seen so much about the fraudulence of virology now since the advent of covid but it still blew my mind.
https://odysee.com/@katie.su:7/thetruthaboutsmallpox:9
Very curious to see what SS guy says in response to my post on smallpox.
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Moondoggie, limited hangout or no, is thorough and hilarious, a fantastic read despite its length. Highly recommended. Anyone who believes the ridiculous fairy tale of tinfoil spaceships flying 250,000 miles through the “vacuum of space ” – and back – four times! – half a century ago – is, to put it bluntly, an idiot, and those who defend and perpetuate this ridiculous story should be dismissed as terminally naive or intentionally misleading.
Looking at you, Petra.
Far more interesting is the fact that every scientific experiment ever devised by man to measure – or even detect – the motion of the Earth has failed to do so, or rather, has succeeded in detecting its motionlessness, the “theory of relativity ” having even subsequently conjured up by that “genius” Einstein to hand-wave away this inconvenient fact. This has been openly admitted to being the raison d’etre of the whole relativistic affair.
Why do sites like this belabor the transparent fairy tales of centuries past, and obsess over the escapades of propaganda celebrities, instead of simply looking at the actual science of Michelson-Morely, Kennedy-Thorndike, Sagnac, Airy’s failure, etc. not to mention the simple but damning Tamarack mine shaft experiment or the Rectilineator? Bunch of smart fellas like you fine folks?
One wonders.
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My sister is very fond of phrasing sentences in the form, “If you believe … [then implied or said] you’re a moron.” I don’t think of myself as “believing” but rather accepting what is presented because I don’t see a reason to doubt. Misstating evidence as “tinfoil spaceships” is simply a cheap way to deride and has no meaning.
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No, the Lunar Landing Module was actually protected by tin foil. At this point, I have to urge you to do what you have never done but claimed to have done, read McGowan’s work. This is why the disregard between us. I can see that you never bothered to read him. Why? Are you just lazy? Unable to focus on reading when you are not predisposed to agree?
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I don’t have to read McGowan’s work to know what protected the LEM. It’s told to us very clearly in the authoritative literature but what covers a vessel isn’t what it’s made of, is it? If we throw some filthy blankets over a Lamborghini that gets caught in hail to protect it, it doesn’t make the car a pile of blankets.
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“I don’t have to read McGowan’s work…” … checkmate.
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Not at all. I did read it as I said I did, I’m just saying the information exists outside his work. The non-existence of the tapes is meaningless because there is heaps of footage of going to the moon – no more is required as evidence.
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ah dipsas ah dipsas ah dipsas … I hear that sound going into the night as I walk away, like the swiping of swords at the sides of soldiers, and realize the battle is won, no one is threatening me, and I get to drift off to sleep. You’re done. Be quiet now.
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On the other side of the iron curtain, tapes were used too. A factory was set up in the GDR, it opened in 1972. My parents worked there, long story short, I never heard of whale oil related to tape. / A rock in space, wich happens to be exactly the size of that star. The moon landing is techno babble. There’s an explanation for everything. BS bingo, endless. Education and industry have been showered with money, same as with every op.
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@HORST: “…exactly the size of that star.”
That star?
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He might be referring to the fact that the moon during an eclipse precisely, not approximately, blocks out the sun, leaving only a gold band and a diamond ring on it. I have always found that to be a curiosity, but have no theories. Just wonder.
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Yes, the official world model explaines the sun as just another star.
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So Mark I’m dipping in here and there to Wagging the Moondoggie of which I have no recollection of when I read it back in about 2015 and I came across this in Part 11.
“The vehicle’s batteries recharged via a collection of solar cells on the inside of the craft’s lid, which was kept open during the lunar day. During the frigid lunar night, the rover hibernated, kept warm by an internal radioactive heat source.”
The astronauts were only on the moon during lunar day there was no “frigid lunar night”. I find it hard to believe that considering how much knowledge McGowan obviously had he would have made this error unintentionally. You recognise he’s a spook, right … just not on the moon landings? … and then there’s ‘ol Billy Kaysing – love the name of his alien scientist nephew, Dietrich von Schmausen.
https://www.quora.com/Did-Apollo-astronauts-experienced-night-time-during-their-journey-to-the-moon
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So wading through a reasonable amount of text what is obvious is that there is no hard debunking of the moon landings, it’s mostly the author deriding things that sound implausible and improbable. I agree with him – many things do sound improbable but then equally improbable are hours and hours of communication between the alleged astronauts and mission control faked to sound completely natural. Evidence wins – we have purported evidence – lots of it – and no contradiction of that evidence. If we didn’t go to the moon there would hard evidence of it, we would not just be limited to an argument comprised mainly of derision of improbable-sounding occurrences.
From Section 12
“The most complicated aspect of the Apollo missions was the landing of the lunar modules, which made the software program controlling that part of the mission the most difficult to design. Amazingly though, that aspect of the software design was not assigned until after most of the other programs were 2/3 complete – and it was assigned to a twenty-two-year-old gent named Don Isles who had just recently started his very first job. According to Moon Machines, “the program without which it would be impossible to land on the Moon … had been written almost as an afterthought by a junior engineer.”
It is rumored that MIT first tried to pawn the job off on a kid who flipped burgers at the local McDonalds, but he apparently had prior commitments.
By mid-1966, Draper’s dream of controlling the entire mission via an onboard computer had been dropped in favor of an Earth-based control system with the Draper system along as back-up. MIT allegedly produced a computer the size of a small fridge, which both the command module and the lunar module were outfitted with. Despite the overwhelming obstacles faced by the MIT team, and the seemingly lackadaisical approach taken with the project, the Apollo guidance system, as would be expected, performed nearly flawlessly on every outing.”
You can get the manual for the computer guidance system on Amazon. Why doesn’t a moon hoaxer go through this manual and expose its flaws?
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It seems someone has already touched on this.
“I came across the source code for the Apollo flight computer. It seems some guy has bothered to scan the printouts so that they can be compiled and executed in a emulator: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
Forgiving the fact that a computer with 24Kbytes and a 2MHz clock would hardly have the muscle to perform the complex calculations needed for stabilizing a rocket, guiding it in a complex trajectory to/from the Moon and even controlling all the onboard systems, I’ve peered into the code looking for what should be the most complex part, that is, the rocket control and guidance algorithm… and the conclusions for anyone who has even a bare minimum of programming knowledge is that it is an absolute fake!
Take for example, this file named ‘POWERED FLIGHT SUBROUTINES’: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-1 … UTINES.agc
It’s a deceptingly simple <400 line assembler program that simply cannot handle all the complexity of gimbal control.
This one is a bit more complex, for reentry control:
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-1 … ONTROL.agc
But again, as a software engineer I would by no means get onboard a “spaceship” controlled by such software!!! This simply cannot work!
Controlling physical systems is a very computationally demanding task that can only be performed by a specialized real time computer that can read, perform calculations, and control the outputs at precise intervals. Nothing that this computer, much less the software the way it’s written can do.”
https://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?p=2414860&hilit=software#p2414860
But again, if you don’t have the faintest clue about software engineering, how do you know if there’s merit in the criticism?
So you will just dismiss it, as usual:
“I’m no expert on this, surely there must be a good explanation, ask debunker XY. In any case, we should stick to objective facts, and the only objective fact is that the moon landings were real.”
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“I’m no expert on this, surely there must be a good explanation, ask debunker XY. In any case, we should stick to objective facts, and the only objective fact is that the moon landings were real.”
This isn’t quite my response to this sort of thing. Yes, definitely my response will be that I don’t have sufficient expertise to make a judgement (although sometimes someone doesn’t need to be an expert even on arcane subjects if what is said obviously doesn’t stack up) – and I think that should be everyone’s response – people shouldn’t be making judgements where they don’t have sufficient expertise, don’t you agree?
However, I don’t say “there must be a good explanation”. What I say is “in the absence of evidence to the contrary” – if someone with seemingly sufficient expertise comes along and tries to argue with the debunking but exposes the fact that they cannot – like so many virologists now trying to argue against the claims that the sars virus hasn’t been isolated, etc great! But in the absence of a seeming expert arguing for the other side while exposing their argument as weak I ignore the debunking which I think is absolutely as it should be.
So the poster says:
“It’s a deceptingly simple <400 line assembler program that simply cannot handle all the complexity of gimbal control.”
My question is, “Why not? What’s missing?” The criticism is too vague to be convincing and even if it were more specific if I felt I didn’t have sufficient expertise to judge I leave it out of argument which is what I think everyone should do, absolutely – too many people judge things where they don’t have sufficient expertise – the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The links are dead now so we don’t even have the source material to have a look at – for what it’s worth.
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“The criticism is too vague to be convincing and even if it were more specific if I felt I didn’t have sufficient expertise to judge I leave it out of argument”
Fair enough, I agree on that, but that’s exactly my point, where’s the logic in asking, as you do:
“Why doesn’t a moon hoaxer go through this manual and expose its flaws?”
while admitting you wouldn’t be able to judge if the criticism has merit or is a load of crap?
A thorough technical analysis of the software would be way over your head, so why bother asking?
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But just because I can’t understand it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Also, if someone does it then I can present it to someone who seems to be of equivalent expertise batting for the other side, giving the other side a chance to respond. Even when you don’t have expertise yourself if there’s a debunking trail to follow created by experts on both sides, who has the better argument can often be seen. This is precisely what I did when someone pro-covid presented me with the paper claiming isolation of sars-cov-2 in the Australian Medical Journal. I asked one of the co-authors of virus mania, Torsten Engelbrecht, for an evaluation of the paper and through his ability to see its flaws I was able to do that too.
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You’ve said now many times that the making of the conversations among Houston and astronauts is evidence that they went to the moon. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make a movie, writing the script, getting the right actors in place, rehearsing, and then take after take after take to get it right? That is not good evidence of anything but a movie. They had been making movies for decades and knew how to do it. So are all the props. The book above is a prop. Please explain all the buttons and switches above, and their various functions. It looks complicated! That would be the point. It is a prop. Indeed there is travel in LOE, but to project from that a trip to the moon and back using untested technology where everything went right on the first attempt … please. It insults my intelligence, and yours. Testing of the LLM on earth nearly killed Armstrong, or so says NASA, it was so unstable. So they sent it 225,000 miles away for a first try, and it worked flawlessly!
C’mon, just a little incredulity please? What I noticed about Covid right away was that the American public was amazingly gullible. If it was on the news, spoken by attractive people wearing nice clothing, then they believed. Buying into the moon landings as you do is more than just stubbornness, but also that same gullibility.
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Mark, in the absence of evidence of fakery I accept evidence as it is purported – I believe that is a rule we should all follow – we should not reject evidence of the basis of the claim – a mantra of my sister’s – “could be faked”. “Could be faked” is meaningless to me unless there is clear evidence of fakery elsewhere. So yes, if there’s clear evidence of fakery over there happy to accept “could be faked” here but where there’s no evidence anywhere that I can see of fakery then I accept evidence as it is purported.
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@Petra: A reasoned, high-plausibility intellectual analysis, presented by someone who is legitimately sufficiently skilled to offer one, trumps any requirement of valid evidence of fakery.
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I didn’t quite finish my reply.
As I’ve said, all the purported evidence – to me – aligns 100% with the very different lunar conditions, notably the black sky in daytime.
If you look at the photos at this page what we see is a piece of reasonably vast terrain where the light is evenly spread across it under darkness, no sign of spotlighting and fall off that you would get with artificial light. Now you might put forward that they’ve used models or whatever but that would need to be explained and the thing is there are so many photos and pieces of footage. I know they used models for Pearl Harbour … but the models are obvious and Simon Shack has even suggested that the footage of the twin tower destructions is faked – love that suggestion, I really do. I think it’s quite possible.
(By the way, I know I certainly wasn’t the first to come up with staged death and injury on 9/11 – far from it – Simon Shack and Fakeologist were on to it years before I had a clue about 9/11 but the thing is even though I was familiar with September Clues and thought what he put forward for fakery had a lot of merit I was still in thrall to some of the propaganda so the most I accepted was that “some deaths were faked”, not all – until my epiphany with William Rodriguez. It’s just that on OffG they’ve taken a ludicrously long time to get the no-brainer that here on POM and certain other sites everyone gets – so there I have been an outcast on staging of death and injury – not just in 9/11 but a couple of other events such as the 1980 Bologna Station bombing – and here I’m an outcast on the moon landings – but that’s OK I can handle it – if I couldn’t I wouldn’t be here. But Scott at least has given me some support – even if, like you, he doesn’t believe in them – which I certainly appreciate.)
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Just to respond further. Improbability and “could be faked” are simply not arguments I fall back on in the face of what I consider compelling evidence. I agree that so very many things about the moon landings were improbable, to me they were a kind of miracle. I believe it was an incredibly lucky confluence of so many things – all the right people at the right time and the right budget – and could easily have never happened … but somehow it did … and then that improbability was capitalised on by the propagandists to mislead the skeptics into turning themselves into Boys-Who-Cried-Wolf hence our friends Dave McGowan and Bill Kaysing.
“You think 9/11 was an inside job? Oh you don’t believe in the moon landings, you’re an idiot conspiracy theorist.”
I mean, regardless of whether you believe the moon landings or not they’ll still call you a conspiracy theorist but disbelieving the moon landings isn’t going to help your cause.
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What “cause”? I do not try to convince anyone of anything. I just write and research. Most people who comment here, with notable exceptions, do not read the post before commenting. They arrive with their saddlebags full of preexisting opinions, and will not be saddled with having to endure alternate views. That’s blogging. I am long getting my fill of it.
All ever asked of you was to read McGowan, and you still have not.
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As I said – and if you wish to accuse me of being a liar go right ahead – the very first thing I looked out when I set out to research the moon landings was WTM and as I also said I found it compelling but as soon as I started to look at the evidence it struck me as more compelling – I trust evidence over what a book says about things. I didn’t revisit the book to check what it said and completely forgot what it said so – in a sense – I may as well have not read it because until I just looked at it now I couldn’t have told you a thing in it and even now looking at it nothing seems particularly familiar.
But now just a brief perusal reveals a glaring error that could not be unintentional – I repeat – could not be unintentional – that of referring to the “frigid lunar night”.
Revelation of the method, Mark, my favourite.
Also, as alluded to by Scott, what he says about fuel and a number of other things must be very deliberately wrong.
Please tell me ONE thing, just one thing you find compelling about WTM because to me there’s no limited hangout there is simply no hangout at all. I want a single piece of compelling evidence – not expression of incredulity and improbability – a single piece of actual evidence that says we didn’t go to the moon.
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It is plainly evident you have never read his work, derivative though it is. If you had you would see that you are faced with an impressive body of evidence that you need to deal with and never do. Instead you choose to focus on minutia. If you will someday do your homework, your tone (and volume of needed work) would change. As it is, yes, I do regard you as a liar. You can change that at any time by taking a week off, reading the work, and dealing with the specifics of each of the 14 chapters. Start debunking! Stop malingering.
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“Impressive body of evidence.” Does that include the evidence that SS effectively debunked, and that Petra and I have both mentioned, but that you have said you can’t be bothered to waste your time on because you already “know” that fake Cold War = fake moon landings? If your belief is founded on the syllogism that the Cold War was fake, the Cold War was the justification for the moon landings, therefore the moon landings are fake, why should any of McGowan’s “impressive evidence” matter?
Like Petra, I read Moondoggie a long time ago and found it persuasive. Now–especially after being humbled by Sensiblesite’s explication of how obviously stupid McGowan’s “evidence” involving the physics of space travel and fuel requirements are–I’m less persuaded.
Do you want to accuse me of lying about having read WTM? Also, out of curiosity, when you read WTM, were you smart enough to immediately see that McGowan’s “evidence” about fuel requirements and space travel were bullshit? It sure embarrasses me to admit that I didn’t give it a single thought.
If you did see through that evidence, could you tell me what evidence you find “impressive” so that I can more easily separate it from the evidence that’s total fricking bullshit? Or maybe you can just point me to the evidence that supports your fake Cold War = fake Moon Landing syllogism. Or just dismiss me as a liar and a lazy-ass, whatever floats your boat.
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It was an impressive body of derivative evidence from various sources. It covered fourteen chapters.
You are blowing off more steam here than is justified. I suspect other crimes I have committed. Otherwise you are a ghost here. Stephers lurks here, I know.
I have never said that fake Cold War = Fake moon landings, only that the Sensible clowns used the fake Cold War to prove their case that the Moon landings were real. Fake Cold War and Fake Moon landings overlap, but one did not cause the other.
My case is that Petri has never read McGowan, not a problem, as he was/is a LHO. She claimed she did, but because, and this is key, his 14 chapters cover a wide range of subject in detail, she needed to go into detail. she never has, and it is not just now, but over quite a time span that I have begged her to get specific.
The question then turns to “why lie about it”? There is no need in blogging for people to be on top of everything, and there is time, God knows, time, to read and reflect. Why not read McGowan, reflect, and offer up some critique of the large volume of derived evidence (from other sources)?
Before Moondoggies, though I am not sure on my own timeline, I read his series on Laurel Canyon. I was wide-eyed, but in work with a friend I realized that even in war zones, young people do not die in such numbers. Something was wrong, and McGowan was hiding it. When, thanks to Tyrone McCloskey, that the singer Bobby Fuller had transmorphed into the Newsguy Bill O’Reilly, did we realize that there was a Not Ready For Prime Time set of actors who were being promoted through the ranks. On discovery that “Janis Joplin” had become “Amy Goodman” of “Democracy Now! did I realize that all news outlets were controlled by a common source, and that we were all living in a giant lie.
Why is Petra lying? It is probably much smaller, maybe having to do with one-upping her sister. So we don’t talk about you in a passive aggressive manner, Petra, Please understand that I do not think you are stupid nor necessarily a liar. It is more complicated. I wish I understood better, but it would not hurt you to read McG.
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Yeah, I lurk here, but comment less often than I used to. It’s nothing personal. I’m just haven’t been fired up enough about the posts or the comments to chime in. You suspect I’m “blowing off steam” over “other crimes” you’ve committed? Nope.
I guess what fires me up is frustration over how difficult it is to have a sane and civil conversation about the world with anyone–including, and sometimes especially, people I largely agree with or at least sympathize with.
I have followed your back and forth with Petra. I have no reason to believe she is lying about anything. You take honest and humble admissions she makes–like the stuff about her father and her sister–and use them to justify verbally bullying and browbeating her. You think I’m “blowing off more steam” than is justified? Ffs, what are you doing with Petra then? She, at least, acknowledges that there is an emotional and maybe even neurotic component behind her inability to stop arguing in circles with you about this. You, on the other hand, find excuses to blame her for your inability to stop being a total asshole toward her. Ffs, why would anyone obey your command to “stop malingering” (!?) and address more of the “evidence” in McGowan’s extremely long series when you have already so arrogantly avoided addressing the faulty evidence she and I have already brought up? It is obvious that your mind is made up, and will stay made up even if she–or I–or Sensiblesite goes through McGowan’s entire series and pokes holes in every single piece of “evidence” he offers.
I’m not confronting you on this because I’m upset over past “sins.” If that were the case, I wouldn’t lurk or comment at all. I know you like a lively comment section, and the comments have been sparse and tame of late, so in my mind, I’m doing you a favor livening things up by calling you out for acting like a total fucking asshole toward Petra. Your welcome. 🙂
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I feel exactly the same way about having a sane conversation with anyone whatever side of the conspiracy fence … including my identical twin. For goodness sake surely if you can’t have a sane conversation with your own twin … ironically, I think she’s the craziest of all! I really do, I think she’s crazy. She accuses me of being a liar just like Mark but I couldn’t bring myself to tell you why … it’s just too crazy.
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McGowan’s work is not original and can be found in other better works, such as Dark Moon. There are some quality videos out there. Dark Moon, in my view, goes off the rails, and might itself be a LHO, All McG did was assemble dissident material, make it seem plausible, add humor, and then fake his death.But take was is good, disregard the rest, but at least read. Ask yourself, why fake his death?
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P.S. I’m slow. It took me a while to realize you must have brought up Stephers because you think I’m still in communication or in cahoots with her. I’m not. I thought you were an asshole to her, too, but it’s none of my business. She can take care of herself, and so can Petra, and I’m not trying to be anyone’s Knight in Digital Armor. I really am just tired of the way hardly anyone I know–online or in real life–and including me sometimes–can have serious disagreements about serious things without being arrogant assholes about it. If there’s a real pandemic, it seems like it’s a pandemic of self-righteous, self-deluded, belligerent, vicious assholery. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to be a much more serious problem than it used to be.
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Oh, and finally… (sorry, I drank too much coffee tonight)…
It also took me a while to get that you’re saying Sensiblesite discredited himself by positing the Cold War was real and that it motivated the moon landings. Therefore, fuck what Sensiblesite says about the physics of space travel, or fuel, or anything else about McGowan’s evidence. Have I got that straight? But… what happened to taking what’s good and leaving the rest? If you can dismiss SS because there’s some bullshit in his work, how can you have the gall to tell Petra to stop malingering, hole herself up, and pick out all of the impressive evidence from an author that you acknowledge was full of bullshit about some things? You justify your arrogance by insisting she must be lying about having read it before, but it is ludicrous of you to claim you can “know” this about her. If she read it a long time ago (like I did), but then (as she has said) came upon other information that led her to her current belief, how can you expect her to set aside her beliefs and pick out McG’s good points from his bullshit when you have zero interest in doing the same with Sensiblesite? You seem to believe you are being logical, rational, and intelligent, and that she is not. That’s not what I’m seeing at all.
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Yes, me neither.
Mark, it makes not a jot of difference whether I’ve read WTM or not. You think there’s good evidence in there and all I’m asking for is one piece. SS debunked points that you cannot counter-debunk and I’ve debunked the claim of “frigid lunar night”. So far, you haven’t presented a single piece of good evidence.
Please provide a single piece from the moon hoaxer’s bible. What better way to establish WTM’s bible status than by presenting one good piece of evidence from it – when you do I’ll certainly start to look at it more seriously but so far you haven’t provided any good reason to.
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Petra, in the first half of the 20th century, George Herrimann published a surreal newspaper comic strip called Krazy Kat. (I’m sure Tim R. knows about it.
The strip went through endless, elaborate variations on a simple story.
Ignatz Mouse throws a brick. The brick hits Krazy Kat in the head. Krazy Kay interprets this as a gesture of love and is delighted, because Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. But then Offisa Pup intervenes and throws Ignatz Mouse in jail. Since the cat and the mouse were perfectly happy with their relationship, Offisa Pup is the comic buffoon of the story.
I see you as Krazy Kat and Mark as Ignatz Mouse. I don’t know why I decided to play Offisa Pup tonight, but it was fun. Now I’ll let you two get back to what you were doing. ha.
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LOL – Well, Offisa Pup I appreciate your injection of sanity and while you may not consider yourself to be a Knight in Digital Armour, I somehow felt gallantry in your intervention – such an old-fashioned term but it simply came to mind.
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Scott, I tend to think SS guy is really quite reasonable and the reason he’s a mainstream thinker on other subjects is simply because he hasn’t been exposed to good argument. I don’t know whether he’s seen my comment on his debunking of the “anti-vaxxers distortions” post but he seems to respond to other comments in a pretty timely manner so I’ll be very curious to see what he says in response to my comment, very curious.
“https://www.reddit.com/r/SensibleSite/comments/j05yvs/debunking_the_antivaxxers_distortions_in/”
I looked up “last person to die of smallpox” and found this:
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_United_Kingdom”
The Shooter Inquiry found that Parker was accidentally exposed to a strain of smallpox virus that had been grown in a research laboratory on the floor below her workplace at the University of Birmingham Medical School. …
Parker died of smallpox at Catherine-de-Barnes on 11 September 1978.[7][17][18] She was the last recorded person to die from smallpox. …
On 6 September 1978, Henry Bedson, head of the Birmingham Medical School microbiology department, committed suicide while in quarantine at his home in Cockthorpe Close, Harborne.[17] He cut his throat in the garden shed and died at Birmingham Accident Hospital a few days later.
Total psyop. Doncha love it?
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The audio from the moon is AMAZING, clear and perfect ALL THE TIME!!! or have you ever heard them break up while speaking from the moon!!!!!! (Supposedly(
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A previous comment disappeared, so I’ll try again.
I disagree with Petra but applaud her for challenging dogma within the conspiracy community.
Mark, you acknowledge that McGowan was likely a limited hangout, but then treat Wagging the Moondoggie like it’s gospel and relentlessly bully Petra for committing what you seem to feel is a thought crime for not accepting it.
You accuse Petra of laziness, but your debunking of Sensiblesite’s debunking of McGowan’s debunking of the moon landing is disappointingly lazy.
Sensiblesite’s article contains obvious bombshells that you overlook to focus on minutiae, or to rehash points you’ve already made a thousand times that do not get to the heart of Sensiblesite’s points. SS makes a mockery of McGowan’s understanding of fuel requirements and his screwball physics. He points out that the Von Braun quote McGowan and many other conspiracists use to claim the head of NASA declared moon travel impossible was taken out of context, ignoring the very next paragraph in the Von Braun document. Have you read that document or that next paragraph? I haven’t. But if I wanted to accuse Petra of laziness, I damn sure would.
The biggest point SS makes about the tapes is that McGowan claims they would have provided important data that is now conveniently lost. SS says that data was not lost, that it was transcribed into documents that are readily available to anyone and that McGowan could have easily found. This is the headline. But you ignore it so that you can make points you’ve already made about the manufactured US/Russia conflict.
It seems to me that McGowan, like MM, sprinkled truthful revelations with wooly-headed reasoning–and flat-out nonsense–in order to keep conspiracists as lost in cognitive dissonance as the mainstreamers are. Your strident, hypocritical, ad hominem laden reaction to Petra for questioning an author you admit was a liar seems to support this view.
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@SCOTTRC: “Conspiracy community”? You mean like the nonexistent “black community” and “gay community”? Those are just fabricated weapon-abstractions, employed to enrage and divide.
Maybe I’m being gullible, but I don’t really see anyone here being intentionally conspiratorial. And there’s certainly no ridiculous “community” concept behind anything. I think it’s entirely (or almost entirely, or mostly entirely) intuitive, intelligent, well-meaning people who have used reasoned logic to deduce that we’ve been incessantly lied to and conned, and we’re trying trying to figure out why and by whom.
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A.D., I share your disdain for that term and pretty much agree with you. Maybe I should have said POM community, or “people who come to POM and leave comments.” In the Internet age, the whole concept of “community” has become confusing… for me, anyway. lol.
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@SCOTTRC: Disdain for how that word has been weaponized, indeed.
So-called….”gays”….are a community??! LOL
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McGowan is a good place to go because in his 14 essays he does a good compendium of the work done by others to show that we never went to the moon. I have read a lot of other stuff too, watched videos, that make the same points. McGowan writing them up only means that Intel was aware of the work and was devising contain strategies to keep the work in check. He did as much with Boston (never saying where he got the footage, which was very sharp and well lit), and Laurel Canyon, where by his own admission he never interviewed a soul. He obviously has a pipeline.
The amount of fuel required to do a nonexistent moon mission? Incalculable. But NASA has at its disposal egg spurts that do this sort of thing, just make shit up and make it stick. The same with records of voice conversations with astronauts. The resources available were immense, but were paltry compared to those available to accomplish whatever it was they were doing behind the facade of moon landings. That they are still running the game in 2019 – 50 years after the fact … well, they were still running the Lincoln Assassination hoax well over a century after the fact. They mean to make their hoaxes stick. Forever. All I did with my rebuttal was to deal with two major flaws, one reliance on Cold War propaganda to make moon landings stick, and the other the disappearance of the magnetic tapes, claiming whale oil shortage, a very clever ruse.
Yes I have been hard on Petra, but I am not stupid and can see through her. With Stephers, I made it clear I was not buying in, and was especially upset that I had wasted five hours of my life watching videos of her friend Alison, not absorbing an iota of her nonsense. Stephers lost me permanently with her magenta spiel, but I made it clear to her that this forum was still available to her. She left of her own accord. I did not remove her authorship until ver recently. Even as we did not think alike, I had no desire to censor her, or either of you, or anyone save Gaia, who gets very personal. You, Scott, have called me names and tried my patience, but you are still free to comment here, even post. As a man who has been banned on every imaginable forum, is that not somewhat unusual, to attack the host as you have, and remain on board?
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What I accuse you of, Mark, is not focusing on the main points. What’s important is not whether or not I’ve read WTM but the fact that I’ve managed – without (re-)reading it since 2014 and all of it long-forgotten – to draw attention to clear lies within it by presenting a debunking of parts of it by SS guy – which you clearly haven’t counter-debunked – and one of my own – “frigid lunar night.”
It is rather you who evince no reading of the moon hoaxer bible by simply never citing anything from it. That’s what those who believe in bibles nornally do – they cite from it, they promulgate its words of wisdom.
I assert that WTM is a work of propaganda from start to finish. Disprove that claim with just one thing in it that clearly debunks the reality of the moon landings.
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@Petra: Your argument was addressed previously. To repeat:
A reasoned, high-plausibility intellectual analysis, presented by someone who is legitimately sufficiently skilled to offer one, trumps any requirement of valid evidence of fakery.
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I don’t consider your requoting of your comment an addressing of my argument in this particular comment, AD, I’m afraid I see no connection.
My argument here is that WTM is a work of propaganda from start to finish. It’s true I don’t know for sure it is because I haven’t revisited it since 2014 and I have virtually no recollection of it, however, since 2014 the following have occurred:
I worked out Bill Kaysing was an agent which no moon hoaxer has done and moon hoaxers should definitely find that disturbing. Nor did they find anything wrong with what is said in WTM as far as I can tell but Scott at least has acknowledged it now. Just Scott.
I looked at both sides of the argument reasonably thoroughly and determined the evidence says astronauts really did land on the moon.
I found SS’s partial debunking of WTM plus I had a casual look myself and of the text I looked at I could see it was simply deriding of things that seemed improbable and, in fact, included a big lie in the form of “frigid lunar night” as the astronauts were only on the moon during lunar day evidenced by the fact that we always see light there – of course, one can argue that the light is artificial but the evidence favours a single light source because we see light evenly distributed over significant terrain and no evidence of multiple shadows which would be caused by multiple light sources.
In another comment Mark justifies “being done” because I have not read WTM – effectively we can say I haven’t because I have no recollection of it from 2014 but the idea that I need to have read this bible to make a cogent argument is illogical. SS’s debunking cites bits from WTM exposing its fraudulence and I myself have cited one item.
Mark is not done at all because while he asserts over and over that WTM needs to be read he gives absolutely no good reason for this to be done. He hasn’t cited a single item within this bible that clearly contradicts the reality of the moon landings … and nor has anyone else so what good reason is there to read it oneself?
I am waiting … and waiting … and waiting … and I say: “Until I get a scintilla of clear contradiction of the reality of the moon landings in WTM I am done.”
Why the reticence? How many of you reading these comments believes so wholeheartedly in the fakery of the moon landings? Where is the item in WTM that contradicts their reality and isn’t just propaganda targeted to those skeptical of the authorities to turn them into Boys-Who-Cried-Wolf?
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@Petra et al.: The absence of confirmation of a deception does not legitimize the deception. (And these elites cover their tracks masterfully.)
Real Science is about establishing magnitudes of validity evidence, not about proving.
If all of you would just read and understand this (twice-posted) comment of mine about the inate nature of genuine scholarship, all of this back-and-forth could cease, already…
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I know I said I was going to stop arguing but this is too much.
“(And these elites cover their tracks masterfully.)”
I don’t follow. Of the hundreds of psyops they perpetrate on us where is there no evidence of “revelation of the method” aka “hidden in plain sight”.
9/11, for example, could not be more in your face. Two planes into the twin towers would have been more than sufficient for their terror event but no – they didn’t limit themselves – they had one sail into Defence HQ. One of the reasons supporting the reality of the moon landings in my book is the absence of this phenomenon … except in the related Bill Kaysing and Dave McGowan.
One of the most important quotes about propaganda – if not the most important:
“The purpose of propaganda is not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponds to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
Edited from Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, British psychiatrist.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/124952-political-correctness-is-communist-propaganda-writ-small-in-my-study
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911 was indeed a lie, but also a concept worth grasping, “agitprop,” or agitation propaganda. It serves a completely different end that ordinary indoctrination of youth and control of news and entertainment. Agitprop seeks action – for 911, two wars were going to be waged, and 911 served to solidify public support.
Most propaganda is just sheep herding for the population. Most of it is not even lies. It seems rather benign, but look around at Covid and see the empty blank faces, how no one even knew to be skeptical. That is a lifelong effect of real propaganda. It creates Zombies who believe everything coming down the pipe. In 1969, as I read, a large percentage of the American public did not beleive the moon landings. The two groups least likely to beleive – African Americans and homosexuals. The reason? They had not yet been effectively assimilated.
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This is the only forum I’ve participated in with any sort of regularity. It never occurred to me to worry about being banned, much less worry about trying your patience as if you were some authority figure that I needed to defer to and choose my words carefully with. Am I supposed to be grateful for your magnanimity? Jesus. Banned or not, I’ll happily go back to being a ghost.
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I’ve been banned in far better places than this. That’s all I was saying.
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I’m not a blogger, but I’m a digital content creator, and I know that you need lively, engaging commenters more than any single one of us needs you. I didn’t just call you names, I called you names in the context of making intelligent and thoughtful arguments, and I wasn’t kidding when I said I felt I was doing you a favor. Actually, I know I was. So forgive me if I don’t feel chastened. That’s all I’m saying.
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I am thinking of moving on to podcasts, as I have a camera and a good microphone and a decent appearance and speaking voice. If I can get one in the oven and done I will move on to guesting. I think my commenters are my first choice for a guest. But that is miles away while I figure out the game.
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Do I need more than to know that I am being lied to all the time? Is my life, for instance, in danger with that belief?
Saw an excellent bumper sticker: “Fuck you, you fucking FUCK!”
I cheered.
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Well look who it is! Hiya, Guya! Now the real party can start!
I’m not a believer in the moon landings, if that’s what you were suggesting. But I know that you and Mark believe that everything you believe about people that you’ve never met is the truth due to how smart you guys are, so I won’t waste my time trying to convince you that anything I might say about myself (or waste any more time trying convince Mark that anything Petra says about herself) is the truth if it contradicts what you guysbelieve that you know.
I’m really sorry, though, that you feel you’ve made no progress in 8 years of trying to convert people to your way of thinking. But keep practicing! Maybe, with a little more time, you’ll figure out how to be more persuasive!
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One can infer from behaviors and written words. In fact, we all do that, as the bulk of communication is subtextual. The idea that we must accept people as they present themselves, when it is well known that people lie, is a clueless manner of living. I inferred that Petra did not read McGowan because she is unaware of almost all of the content of his work. This is not rocket science.,
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If nothing else, this post has caused Petra to delve, even if only a little and even if only looking for ammunition, into McGowan’s work. Now if we can only get her to critique the larger body of evidence he presented (not his original work, as he is an LHO), we might have a reasoned debate. The phoniness of pretending to have read him when she has not is off-putting, to say the least. To say “I read him in 2014” is an obvious dodge. It all insults my intelligence. Good day, Petra, and please, come back when you have done your homework. You’re not banned, but you are advised that continued stubbornness and refusal to apply yourself will result in comments removed, not a ban, but close. If you’ve got it, if you are capable, then bring it for real. This is not an exercise in focus on minutia as a debating tactic, but a grasp of a large body of evidence, available to you when you choose to avail yourself of it. Until,then, stop bullshitting me.
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Mark, I’m aware of how pointless my intervention has been, I’m tired of my Offisa Pup act, and I have no more hope that I’ll get through to you than I do that you’ll get through to Petra or vice versa. But, by way of wrapping up my quixotic turn here, I’ll just say this…
If you’re suspicious of Petra’s motives or her integrity, why do you keep engaging with her? Your characterization of her allows you to delude yourself that your mean-spirited insults and accusations are made in the righteous pursuit of truth, or something–you use this characterization to paint her as the Bad Guy, yourself as the Good Guy, and it is embarrassingly childish. While other commenters are making very interesting points about Free Expansion of Gas into the Vacuum (which I didn’t know about, and find compelling), you’re jumping up and down yelling “Liar liar pants on fire!” over an issue that absolutely no one in the world but you gives the tiniest little shit about: The issue of whether or not someone on the Internet who goes by the name of Petra and believes in the moon landings has read Wagging the Moondoggie. If you believe that doing so makes her look like the dumb-ass and not you… well, I don’t know what else to say.
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I expected you to lecture me again, without noticing that you are engaged in the same behavior. Petra can be infuriating, but you can be so condescending. Have I treated you in some manner that makes me a target of your lectures? No. You’re just defending Petra, your business, and not my concern.
Petra challenged me to find one thing in McG that “proves” that the moon landings were fake. McG’s work is a compendium of all of the work done by countless people up to that time. In his 14 essays he points at literally hundreds of pieces of “evidence,” not “proof,” that the moon landings were faked. As a LHO guy he was hiding more than revealing, and my challenge has always been to find out what he is hiding. I suspect it was to do with spacecraft in lower earth orbit, either spying on everyone, or other functions I cannot begin to fathom. All of Apollo and Space Shuttle were focused on LEO. I doubt it is weaponry, as we have effective one-world government, and probably did to in the late 60s and 70s. There would be no one to threaten, and anyway, I’ve never seen any evidence of any use of space-based weapons. If you know of some, I am all ears.
There was one piece of evidence (not proof) the was mentioned in Moondoggie, that of the head of NASA saying (within the last 15 years – I’ll have to look it up) that NASA simply does not have the technology for a moon shot, so that travel there is impossible. Had Petra read Moondoggie, she would know about that.
My alternative with Petra was to pretend she is real and really knows how to reason in the face of great uncertainties. For me, that’s a bridge too far. In all my years of blogging, I have only on rare occasions used the word “proof,” as such comfort does not exist. I am always aware I can be and often have been wrong. But the moon landings … nah. Not going there.
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I haven’t gone there either. And I absolutely acknowledge that I’ve been indulging in the same behavior as you (including the condescension). Offisa Pupp, as I said above, is the buffoon in the triangle, needlessly inserting himself into a relationship between Ignatz Mouse and Krazy Kat that neither has a problem with. I’ll even own up to why I did it: I was bored. I’m grateful to the other commenters for teaching me about why fuel-based missions are impossible, though, which McGowan never covered.
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Scott, I’m sticking to my word of not continuing argument so I’m not putting this forward to argue it and in any case I don’t understand physics and don’t have a clue about the merit of either side – this is just to advise that there is a response to this argument if you wish to consult it.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/91789/rocket-thrust-gas-free-expansion-of-gas
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Petra, I squeaked through college Physics with a D-minus. I tried to read the explanations in that link, but my eyes glazed over and crossed pretty quickly. One of the reasons I don’t argue with people about this and other “conspiracy” issues is that I know I have zero authority and credibility. If the idea that moon landings happened makes sense to you, by all means, go with God. I certainly don’t think your or anyone else’s life would be improved if you changed your mind. (Well, maybe Mark’s. lol.)
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So funny that you should say “go with God” because what came to mind – seemingly from nowhere – when I decided to leave this argument were the words of the Irish comedian, Dave Allen, whose show I loved as a child and whose final words always were “Goodnight and may your God go with you.”
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Also, how do you steer a rocket in a vacuum? Is the official story that they perfectly calculated all the trajectories over thousands of miles, and didn’t need to do any fine-grained adjustment in flight? In a vacuum, you can’t angle wing flaps or anything to adjust course – no resistance. I forget, was the rocket just a perfectly smooth tube by the time it got up there.. I know on the ground it’s got a few fins..
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Scott, this is again not entering into argument but I think everyone has their own rules for critical thinking and these are mine:
I look at all the pieces of evidence I know I can understand and look for consistency in those. The nature of reality is that every single piece of relevant information will support if not favour the correct hypothesis, no matter how large or small – if it is relevant it will support the correct hypothesis. Every single piece of evidence I can understand for the moon landings supports the “we went” hypothesis as far as I can tell. I think other people don’t take care to ensure all the pieces fit – I see the picture of reality very much as a jigsaw puzzle and it’s very easy to say, “Hey, I don’t think combustion of a rocket engine can happen in space for reasons x, y and z” or whatever and dismiss an hypothesis on that criterion alone without also ensuring everything else fits. Everything must fit and that’s what I look for. If there’s stuff I don’t understand I don’t worry about it as long as there’s quite a lot of information I do understand because I think the clear picture of the jigsaw will still be made – we don’t need all the pieces to know if a jigsaw is a picture of a lake or a forest, the only pieces required are the ones that will distinguish the picture from all other pictures while at the same time they must all fit the picture.
I’ve written a three-part article on critical thinking and the moon landings, 9/11 and covid if you’re interested.
https://petraliverani.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-the-moon-landings
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I’m sorry, Petra. I know you mean well, and you’re sincerely passionate about this topic to a degree that I, frankly, cannot comprehend. But unsolicited lessons on critical thinking are off-putting to me. I daresay they’re off-putting to all adults, educated or not, capable of critical thinking or not, and especially if those adults know you’re trying to change their beliefs about something that they have not asked you to enlighten them upon in the first place. The only time I’ll accept an unsolicited lesson on critical thinking is if we already agree on something and the lesson is what we wish all the muddle-headed people who disagree with us would get through their thick skulls. I’ll eat that shit up, but that’s not where we are, and I really don’t care to discuss it anymore. 🙂
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OK, Scott, I’m sorry you see it that way. I don’t mean it to seem like a lesson so much as simply my ideas on critical thinking and if someone were to offer me the same I’d feel a sense of curiosity as to what their ideas on critical thinking were to see if I agreed with them. Mark thinks he’s a critical thinker, I think I am, presumably you think you are too and people who believe 9/11 was the work of Arab terrorists have websites on critical thinking … and yet if we’re all critical thinkers how do we have such different ideas?
Do we believe in the same fundamental rules of critical thinking but just don’t follow them where biases interfere or do we have different rules and how are they different?
I think this is an interesting quote from a social psychologist.
“People can be extremely intelligent, have taken a critical thinking course, and know logic inside and out. Yet they may just become clever debaters, not critical thinkers, because they are unwilling to look at their own biases.” – Carol Wade.
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Just to give a recent example.
I’m on the Australian Suddenly Gone FB page for people concerned about deaths from the jab and someone who believes all the BS came on the page which I thought was pretty brave. I mentioned Dr Sam Bailey to which he immediately put forward an alleged debunking by an academic in science communication, Alison Campbell. Then we got to discussing our rules for critical thinking. I said these are my two:
— Aim to prove your hypothesis wrong
— Confine analysis to the unarguable facts in the first instance
He put forward about 20 some of which I agreed with and some not.
I asked him if he followed up by looking at Sam’s response to Alison’s attempt at debunking – he hadn’t – in fact, even in the comments on Alison’s post there were critical comments, apart from the fact of course that one can apply one’s own evaluation of the debunking. I’m like, OK, you didn’t do due diligence.
Then I put forward the unarguable fact that the PCR test is an admitted non-diagnostic test. He tried to argue against it but couldn’t. Then he dropped out.
He really thinks he’s a critical thinker … but I think it’s clear he isn’t and it doesn’t matter how many rules he has he’s not following the right ones.
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Petra… please… I’m begging you… for the love of God… stop.
This is the last time I’m going to respond.
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Very happy to stop, Scott, the last thing I want is to get into another argument. However, as it was of no interest to you, rather than explain why, all you had to do was not respond to my earlier post ending, “if you’re interested,”
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Any analysis of the moon landings that ignores volumes of evidence, as you have done, is flawed.
Someone has to do it, so I will re-read McGowan and offer a list of his evidential material. It is voluminous.
With the understanding that McGowan is still alive, was a spook, and offered a limited hangout, the object of which is to use truth to tell lies.
More later.
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That site is hilarious. Added bonus, it’s actually a reply to Boethius posting at Cluesforum.
Those physics geeks can’t say anything in plain English, they have to throw in 50 opaque variable letters and terms. Best I can tell, it sounds like they are saying because the molecules of fuel are bouncing around inside a chamber that DOES have pressure, that somehow force will be generated. But it reads like obfuscation of the essential point that when they are released out the back of the rocket, they are released into a vacuum. So no thrust.
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Wow, Tim, that’s good thinkin’ fer a cartoonist! haha
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Not sure how this is intended, but while conceding I’m just an ink-stained hick, I think a plain English explanation of how a rocket could work in a vacuum is not too much to ask of these “science gods.” You could claim to prove Hindu cosmology, or anything at all, if you threw in enough equations and variables, and then dismissed critics as ignorant laypeople. But you won’t persuade anyone except those in awe of your jargon. No news to you I’m sure, but just saying…
I guess if they responded to the point about steering rockets in space, they’d do the same sort of thing. How on earth (well, space) would you steer in a vacuum? “Oh, lots of equations.. it’s simple once you get your physics PhD..”
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It’s the usual collection of ad hominem and fallacies made to impress the gullibles.
1) The apples and oranges fallacy. Equating gas molecules, solid objects and pushups.
“Geez, I must say that it was pretty entertaining too; that guy is so passionately wrong. With regards to your question I don’t think the free expansion term is even relevant here. Think about it, if the rocket was expelling stones at high velocity rather than fuel in space, wouldn’t the rocket move the same way?”
The rocket is not expelling fuel, it’s expelling gas molecules.
Expelling, or more correctly, letting gas molecules expand, is not like expelling stones, because solid object dont move on their own. You have to apply an external force to make them move. The force (action) applied to “expel” (accelerate) stones out of the rocket would translate into an equal and opposite force applied to the rocket, the “recoil” effect (Newton 3).
Gas molecules have the peculiar property of being in constant motion, so there’s no need to apply external forces to make them move (or expand). They are already moving at high speed inside the combustion chamber BEFORE the expansion takes place. Opening the valve and letting them freely expand you are just giving them a longer path to travel, not changing their velocity (i.e. accelerating) or their linear momentum. Where there’s no acceleration there’s no force (Newton 2), and we are back to no force=no recoil.
“The website you linked is stupid. It says “The problem with applying Newton’s 3rd is that the rocket’s propellant does not generate force in a vacuum according to the laws of physics and chemistry. If the force of the propellant is 0 then Newton’s 3rd states that Force on Rocket=-Force of Gas. If Force of Gas = 0 the rocket does not move.”
This is entirely and utterly false. If the gas accelerates, that means that the gas did have a force applied to it according to f = ma. Force was not 0 so rocket does move. Why? Because of newton’s third law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. A simple proof of this is pushups. If you’ve ever done one, you know that when you push down against the ground, you go up. In a rocket ship, the exhaust expelled from the propulsion system is the ground.”
If there’s no resistance to the gas expansion, as in a vacuum, there’s nothing affecting the velocity of the molecules, hence how can they accelerate (i.e changing their velocity)? And lest we forget, no acceleration=no force, but maybe I’ve already said it before.
“The rocket pushes down against the “ground” (exhaust gasses) in order to move up.”
Is the rocket deliberately pushing on the exhaust because he desperately wants to move up?
2) The pressure imbalance fallacy (The Baron Munchausen effect)
“Think of it this way: First, you have a closed container, sitting in vacuum and containing a gas with some nonzero pressure P inside. The force on the walls is the same in all directions, no matter the shape of the container, but for simplicity you can picture it as a cube with side lengths. Each wall will have a force Ps2 pushing on it.
Now remove one wall. There will no longer be any force acting on it (your “free expansion” principle), but until the gas is fully evacuated there will be a force on the opposite wall. So your container has a net force in the opposite direction from the gas expulsion lasting for some time. Momentum is conserved; rockets work.”
In short, if we imagine the opposite wall to be movable (sort of a piston), as we open the valve breaking the previous equilibrium, we should expect it to start moving in the direction opposite to that of the exhausting gas. If the wall was connected to a pressure gauge that would be read as an increase in the internal pressure.
So now we have a situation where, ceteris paribus, there’s both an increase in volume (the valve opening, or a wall removed) and an increase in pressure.
That would be a violation of Boyle’s law PV=K.
The conceptual problem with the pressure imbalance is that it’s another way of saying that the rocket is “pushing on itself” (The Baron Munchausen effect).
We can look at it from another perspective, in a closed system, all the forces and total momentum are perpetually in equilibrium. That’s obvious since by definition, if the system is perfectly closed it’s total internal energy has no way to change. It can be exchanged in the form of forces and momentum between components inside the system, but the total sum stays always the same.
That’s a convoluted way to explain why you cannot lift yourself by pulling your hairs. You are a closed system and all the forces all balanced. To open the system you need something external to you to apply forces on.
A rocket in space is a closed system and letting a gas to expand against zero resistance (=zero force), cannot be a way to open the system because there is no interaction external to it.
The only way a rocket can move in space is by pulling his own hairs.
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“The rocket is not expelling fuel, it’s expelling gas molecules.”
Fuel/ gas molecules have mass, anywhere in this universe, vacuum or not. That’s the point you’ve overlooked. What is actually going on is expelling of the (fuel’s) mass at high velocity, which is the thrust or work in physical terms (force over time). This is the force that we’re focusing on and this has nothing to do with pushing against the pressurised atmosphere. The force caused by combustion of the gases adds to acceleration of escaping gases <= mass #1, which in turn creates more force over time (thrust) and pushes against the rocket <= mass #2 in the opposite direction.
“A rocket in space is a closed system and letting a gas to expand against zero resistance (=zero force), cannot be a way to open the system because there is no interaction external to it.”
a)You don’t need a 3rd component in the equation for the rocket to start moving. b)static atmosphere or vacuum have no force attached to it, that’s why they’re static. c) More importantly, expansion of gases is secondary in creating creating the thrust- the force needed to push against the rocket and accelerate it, comes from/is created by expelling mass (combusted gases) with high velocity. Such force is there regardless of vacuum or atmospheric pressure. Expansion in this case represents the chemical reaction of combustible compounds that are ignited in order to create energy burst, supplying higher force than it could be harnessed just by letting the gases escape without igniting them.
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“Fuel/ gas molecules have mass, anywhere in this universe, vacuum or not. That’s the point you’ve overlooked.”
Not overlooked at all, but mass and velocity don’t make a force, we need a change in velocity to have a force.
Solid/liquid fuels and gas molecules have different properties, as I said, equating them is a fallacy.
They both have mass, but only gas molecules have intrinsic constant velocity (depending on the gas temperature/internal energy) and freedom of movement.
Stating it another way, we could say that solid and liquids have intrinsic inertia of rest, while gas molecules have intrinsic inertia of motion.
That means the natural attitude of a gas is to expand, ad infinitum. No need for us to bother applying any force, just let it expands and it will go on his merry way happy like a clam, forever in search of his ideal world of zero pressure. Actually we need to apply forces (eg in the form of containers) to stop a gas from expanding.
Bottom line, if there’s no resistance to the expansion, just letting a gas expand requires none additional external force, and gives you back zero additional force. In term of energy it’s a perfectly neutral process, and that’s why during a free expansion (i.e. against zero resistance) the internal energy of the gas and (hence its temperature) doesn’t change. But since we know that the temperature is also reflected in the molecules’s velocity (or viceversa if you like), the initial velocity also doesn’t change, and that means no force is involved.
The initial temperature (prior to the expansion), cold, hot, very hot, super hot, doesn’t make one iota of difference. That’s for the enthusiasts who think that “expelling very hot gasses” will obviously give you a lot of propulsion.
“What is actually going on is expelling of the (fuel’s) mass at high velocity, which is the thrust or work in physical terms (force over time). This is the force that we’re focusing on and this has nothing to do with pushing against the pressurised atmosphere. The force caused by combustion of the gases adds to acceleration of escaping gases <= mass #1, which in turn creates more force over time (thrust) and pushes against the rocket <= mass #2 in the opposite direction.”
You seem to talk about fuel and exhaust as if they were almost the same thing. Actually they are totally unrelated in our reasoning.
“The force caused by combustion of the gases”
There’s no combustion of the gases. Gases are only a byproduct of fuel combustion.
What actually goes on is that the solid/liquid fuel is the source of stored energy that we use (via the burning process) to generate a huge amount of very fast gas molecules (i.e. with high temperature/internal energy). This is the phase where the stored (fuel) energy is converted in the combustion chamber into the internal energy of the gas.
At this point what we have is basically simply a chamber with high pressure inside, still not very useful.
But the whole point of burning fuel to generate a gas is exactly because we know that a gas will instantly try to expand, so that we can take advantage of the expansion to perform whatever we like to perform.
This is the second phase, where the internal energy of the gas is converted into work via the expansion.
– If the walls of the chamber are designed so that they will blow up under the pressure, we call it a bomb.
– If one of the wall is made of lead or other suitable metals and designed so that it will start moving at high speed when pushed by the expanding gas we call it a firearm.
– If one of the wall is designed to move under pressure to a limited amount, then go back in a cicle we call it a combustion engine.
– If one of the wall is actually missing and is conceptually replaced by a virtual wall of a pressurized fluid that resists the expansion, to the point of allowing the chamber to keep a sufficient pressure that in this way acts as a propelling force, we call it a jet engine.
In each and every of those examples, the internal energy of the gas cannot stay the same, it has to decrease because is converted in mechanical work, and that can happen only and if only there’s something RESISTING the expansion.
There are only two situations where there is no way to take advantage of the expansion
1- never let the gas expand
2 – let the gas expand without any resistance
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Like I supposed, you lack understanding of the Newton’s 2nd law (and 3rd, btw) and have missed the issue at question.
F = (m1 * V1 – m0 * V0) / (t1 – t0)
That’s what’s going on, dear AK. Force is equal to change in momentum, per change in time. The change in gases’ momentum (acceleration in our case) gives you the force needed to propel the rocket. No resistance required. I believe we’ve cleared that.
The difference in velocity is regarding the expelled mass, aka rocket fuel, aka gases – at the beginning, t0, its velocity was imposed by some kind of a fuel injector, say x mph. At t1, and after combustion/expansion, the same mass has huge velocity as it exits the engine, uneducated guess would be between 50-100 times x. When above equation is applied, we get enormous amount of force created from gases’ change in momentum (mass times velocity) per change in time. No resistance needed, I repeat.
Forces result from interactions. For every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since in our case the force is created by accelerating gases, the rocket will accelerate in the opposite direction. Simple as that is Newton’s 3rd law.
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Sorry but I couldn’t resist. Last remark then I’ll leave all you folks alone on this, I swear.
“at the beginning, t0, its velocity was imposed by some kind of a fuel injector, say x mph. At t1, and after combustion/expansion, the same mass has huge velocity as it exits the engine, uneducated guess would be between 50-100 times x.”
Did I just read that you are comparing the velocity of the injected fuel to the velocity of the gas molecules after the fuel combustion?
Do you seriously think that’s the difference in velocity the force comes from?
What about propulsion without fuel?
A rocket and an inflated balloon work in the same way.
From the horse’s mouth:
“A rocket in its simplest form is a chamber enclosing a gas under pressure. A small opening at one end of the chamber allows the gas to escape, and in doing so provides a thrust that propels the rocket in the opposite direction. A good example of this is a balloon. Air inside a balloon is compressed by the balloon’s rubber walls. The air pushes back so that the inward and outward pressing forces are balanced. When the nozzle is released, air escapes through it and the balloon is propelled in the opposite direction. When we think of rockets, we rarely think of balloons. Instead, our attention is drawn to the giant vehicles that carry satellites into orbit and spacecraft to the Moon and planets. Nevertheless, there is a strong similarity between the two. The only significant difference is the way the pressurized gas is produced. With space rockets, the gas is produced by burning propellants that can be solid or liquid in form or a combination of the two.”
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/rocket/TRCRocket/rocket_principles.html
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Oh, yes, you read that right. In case you didn’t know – and since we’re discussing alleged moon landings let’s stick with the technology of the era – Apollo’s engines ran on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Them both gases. The very nanosecond these two liquefied gases exited their reservoir, they transformed back into the gaseous form. Yet their mass is constant, regardless of their state. If and when you accelerate them as they are exiting the engine, like during the combustion, they are expelled at high velocity. And that’s where the momentum comes from and consequently force and work. I’m glad you chimed in because it shows you gave it some thought. Just…keep at it. You seem to be a smart one, and very close to understanding the principles of conservation of momentum.
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I didn’t address two very good questions.
Do you seriously think that’s the difference in velocity the force comes from?
What about propulsion without fuel?
Lets look at the 2nd one first. I’m trying to think of one example, but can’t. But I think you’re trying to find another example, where an object is travelling without moving, so to speak. In all animal cases+human, movement comes from physical work of the host.
Maybe the balloon analogy can serve for both answers, although it can be misleading if you’re not focused enough. The true reason of balloon’s propulsion is the change in momentum of the expelled volume of air/gas – before the nozzle is released, its velocity is zero, then as we open the nozzle, it gains velocity / accelerates for two reasons: difference in pressure and additionally energy stored in its rubber envelope. In rocket’s engine, there’s no rubber storage, but the pressure is produced with combustion. The energy from the chemical reaction is transformed into heat plus movement of the mass / gases due to expansion. This also makes a point where you can now see how low level environment (and vacuum) is actually beneficial for such mechanism of propulsion as there is no atmosphere resisting expulsion of gases from the engine.
Horse’s mouth was right. But I think you believe he’s made an argument for your stance, while he’s actually talking about the conservation of momentum.
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Just to add, no matter your motive was boredom – I wouldn’t say it was needless – I appreciated it.
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Like Scott I’m thoroughly fed up with constantly feeling I cannot have a sane conversation with people whichever side of the conspiracy fence. I keep telling myself I’m going to give up constant argument with people but then I don’t, however, I think now the time has definitely come. I’ve turned into a total bore living in a rut and need to change my life. I’ve just started reading Becoming Supernatural by Joe Dispenza and hope it might help me get a proper life.
I’m happy to stay on POM to read the posts and if I make a comment it won’t be one that will involve ongoing argument. I will leave Davey boy, Wagging the Moondoggie and the moon landings just where they are.
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ScottRC – I do know the Krazy Kat eternal triangle, yes. It used to puzzle me greatly, but now I appreciate Ab’s constant refrain, that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference..
Anyway I’m mainly chiming in to say that I too would love to see the mainstream response to the problem of rocket propulsion in a vacuum. That’s so intuitive, you don’t have to be a physicist to understand the issue. Either you toss out “space is a vacuum,” or you toss out space travel by rocketry, it seems to me.
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“…the problem of rocket propulsion in a vacuum. That’s so intuitive, you don’t have to be a physicist to understand the issue. Either you toss out “space is a vacuum,” or you toss out space travel by rocketry, it seems to me.”
That’s logical fallacy.
Implying that the problem with rocketry in vacuum exists doesn’t make it real. The problem is actually in your insufficient understanding of the physics and mechanical principles, and completely missing the issue and point of Newton’s 3rd law, which led you to a wrong conclusion along with your intuition.
Secondly, it’s not either / or.
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MM, I want to use your comments for a new post, moving on from this overwrought discussion of McGowan. I’ve never been convinced that space travel is impossible, only that manned space travel, while not impossible, presents so many obstacles as to make it a foolish undertaking. Let machines do the work, and indeed the Russians and possibly the Americans did launch and land (or explode) probes on the moon, though the one on Mars seems farcical.
I can use your comments here without permission as it is a public forum, but I would rather you consent. Please let me know.
By the way,Elon Musk launching and then reverse landing rockets is also farcical. Indeed he (or DARPA) can launch them, and they are becoming part of Starlink, a handoff system where a steady Internet system can be delivered to rural areas that are now limited to geosynchronous satellites or phone lines, the latter which are antiquated. The equipment is too old, at least with Centurylink.,
Hopefully, with your input, we can put the idea of the impossibility of space travel to bed. Both Clues Forum and Fakeologist went off on a tangent here.
Please let me know. Although I can, I will not cite you directly without permission. I will merely offer my take on your comments.
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Point taken.
I should have cut my ramblings long before, after a short while we invariably end up going round in circles.
Boring and annoying, even more for the bystanders.
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That was not a shot at you by any means. This post with 200 comments has become cumbersome. That’s all.
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Permission granted. 🙂
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Stationary geosynchronous orbit is 22,292 miles above the surface of the earth. There are said to be between 500-600 satellites out there. I have two pieces of evidence that they are really there – one, when companies came here to see if they could put a dish on our house to catch a signal. They all had to point south, and our trees interfered. They are all orbiting above the equator. One, Viasat got through because their satellite was able to point southeast, still at the equator, and get through our trees.
The other is that our Viasat signal, in fact, all geosynchronous satellite signals, are inappropriate for phones and gaming, as the time it takes the signal to travel 22,292 miles creates a delay making phone conversations difficult at best, and gaming impossible.
For that reason, I find the idea that satellites cannot funtion in space to be questionable. It appears to me they somehow got out there, and are functioning.
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