I think a healthy skepticism *which takes all the evidence into account* is great. But choosing your evidence to support your hypothesis is the opposite of science.

Not to mention the British, the French, the Germans and pretty much every nation on Earth with the capability of receiving radio signals and determining their direction.

- Jack

Actually, Nigel, you were correct about the different composition of the tiles in different areas. The tiles in the highest heat areas (like leading edges of the wings) are a carbon-carbon composite. The highest heat area, the tip of the nose, is yet another composition, but off the top of my head I can’t remember what it is. On the X-20 (Dyna Soar) it was a silicon-graphite inner shell covered with zirconia ceramic tiles, but I don’t think the Shuttle is quite that exotic.

The reason I left all that out is that I was just debunking the “Minnesota Mud” statement and there was no reason to go into such detail.

- Jack

And in doing that, they have insulted the brave lives we lost on the launchpad (3 from Apollo 1), during the launch (7 aboard Challenger), and during re-entry (7 aboard Columbia), not to mention the lives of the fallen Cosmonauts over the past 40 years. It is offensive to me for anyone to dishonor some of humanity’s greatest explorers in such a way, and I am not easily offended.

Oh, they insult the brave lost lives even more, by claiming they were killed by NASA to avoid exposing the conspiracy. Ugh.

Sounds like a good idea, bringing Sibrel to the moon. Then we can tell him that the moon’s lack of oxygen is a hoax and he doesn’t *really* need a spacesuit to walk on the moon.

You first claim that you believe nothing that the government tells you. Then you claim that Iran only wants nuclear power, not weapons. That’s what Iran’s government has said. If you don’t believe what governments say, then shouldn’t you not believe what their government says also? Or is the disbelief limited to the US Government for some reason?

I’ve been a prof. 30 yrs. and couldn’t agree more.

I think there’s more to critical thinking than academic qualifications. A person can have a Nobel prize and still be wrong (e.g. Einstein and his rejection of quantum theory). Conversely, a person can have very little academic education and be right. I try to judge a person’s argument by its own merits, not by how many letters they have after their name (BTW, I have plenty letters after my name, but I try not to use them to make my argument sound more impressive than it is).

The quality of thinking in USA has declined in those years.

Well, that’s as may be, but be careful you don’t simply assume that all commenters here are USAians. As well as Canadians, there are several Europeans and Aussies who regularly comment here too.

People groupthink, not critical think.

I’m not sure to what you refer here. If you mean the instant dismissal of Jack’s comment, he’s only reiterating arguments that have been made (and refuted) several times before.

If someone uses a set of arguments that you have heard 50 times and refuted 20 times to support an idea that you know to be wrong, would you be more inclined to simply dismiss them or would you address their argument point by point on the assumption that they are innocently misinformed?

And those who call you troll are just labelling, not listening to your argument (with the exception of a couple posts here who rebutted your argument well)

This remains to be seen. Jack posted a comment (#12) that has been soundly rebutted. If he is able to accept the rebuttal then I will condemn those who labelled him “troll”. If, however, he ignores the rebuttal (or at least, the bulk of it) and persists in supporting the moon hoax idea, then he will have proved himself to be a troll.

In support of those who labelled him “troll”, there are some clues:
(1) Jack’s comment shows a pitiful lack of research into manned spaceflight;
(2) Jack’s argument shows a lack of understanding about some fundamentals of physics (in Jack’s case, different kinds of radiation and what is needed to protect against them);
(3) Jack’s use of language suggests that his “14 years of higher education” were mostly spent in the bar, not in the library;
(4) As Markle points out (#62), Jack’s standard of proof, while seeming to be reasonable, is ludicrous.

Now, any one or two of these failings can be permitted the benefit of the doubt, but in combination it starts to get very hard to give him that benefit.

@Nigel Dawes’ limit (R=11.6/D ; R in arcsec, D in cm) and the small angle formula (S=X * d/206265; S=linear size, X=angular size in arcsec, d=distance) combined with a perigee of ~360,000km is all you need for a sufficient approx. Simple arithmetic. None of that frightening trig needed. Comes to about 1.7-1.8m for a 100m telescope.

How to tell it’s a troll. Hoaxers can generally manage to get at least one thing correct. There’s not a single thing about that post that is correct. Although trolls tend to stick around for the argument, sometimes they just pop in to sow discord. This can be as simple as initiating a pedant war.

Another clue, unreasonable proof. The proof demanded is physically impossible with current technology. Even the original design OWL would have just resolved man made objects on the moon at perigee if we somehow managed to figure out how to remove the Earth’s atmosphere. I don’t think a prime focus cage for visual observations was planned in any case.

http://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/index.php/2009/07/question-of-the-week-what-would-you-do-with-the-moon/

Moon landing anniversary:10 reasons the Apollo landings were ‘faked’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/space/5780272/Moon-landing-anniversary-10-reasons-the-Apollo-landings-were-faked.html

Or ’10 reasons the Daily Telegraph need a science writer’ if you ask me…

“For those who call me a troll: I feel sorry for you since aren’t very well read or educated (14 years of higher education here. A good deal of it in the earth sciences, physical science, health, and astronomy).
I suppose it would be easier for some to just live life thinking shallowly and not examining life beyond our personal little bubbles. Such a shame. And we wonder why we are falling as a nation from being the center of the Earth/Universe…sighs…shrugs.”

I’ve been a prof. 30 yrs. and couldn’t agree more. The quality of thinking in USA has declined in those years. People groupthink, not critical think. And those who call you troll are just labelling, not listening to your argument (with the exception of a couple posts here who rebutted your argument well)

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png

The tiles on the shuttle are not made of mud. They are made of silica fibers (basically sand that has been melted and extruded) sintered together. This forms a substance that can not only withstand the 3,000 degrees of the reentry plasma without melting, but is excruciatingly slow at transmitting that heat into the orbiter’s structure. Also, they are only 3 or 4 inches thick, not 18.

BTW, the shuttle’s flight attitude with the cargo bay towards the Earth has nothing to do with radiation from the sun. Well, not the kind you mean. It flies that way to keep the radiators on the inside of the bay doors in the shade. Rejecting heat towards the Earth is a lot easier than dealing with rejecting it into space (much colder) with the occasional blast by the sun.

Oops, I spoke too soon. Looks like some of what I said (54) isn’t quite right. Maybe I shoulda read the whole thread before commenting.

For those who call me a troll: I feel sorry for you since aren’t very well read or educated (14 years of higher education here. A good deal of it in the earth sciences, physical science, health, and astronomy).

Define “higher” education.

In my mind, high school doesn’t count.

By the way, if you have qualifications in the topics you list, how come you so obviously know nothing about radioactivity and radiological protection?

You might make light of the people like myself that don’t believe the moon walk but there are some facts that remain:

Today we fly a space shuttle and it doesn’t go very high in altitude since the radiation from the sun over extended periods would severely effect the astronauts health.

This is nonsense.

Shuttle doesn’t fly very high because it is too damned heavy and can’t carry enough fuel. I believe the highest it goes is to about 600 miles (for rendezvous with Hubble). The radiation in the Van Allen belts is mostly charged particles like protons and electrons, and the skin of Shuttle is a pretty good shield against that type of radiation.

For this reason they fly the craft with the bottom up so that the tiles made of a special mud or soil, will absorb that radiation.

Actually, they fly the craft with the bottom forwards, so it protects them from orbital debris (such as chunks of that weather satellite that the Chinese blew up a while back). The tiles are mostly made of carbon-ceramic composite, BTW, not mud or soil. The tiles that face the greatest heat stress are made of reinforced carbon-carbon composite. Go look this up on Wikipedia or something. Did you do more than 10 seconds’ research to reach your conclusion?

They learned from the Soviets during the cold war that a layer of soil a mere 18 inches thick would protect items from radiation during an atomic attack. (We also got car-pool lanes from them too.)

Nuclear weapons emit gamma- and X- radiation, which is far more penetrative than particular radiation such as is common on the Van Allen radiation belts. Hence the need for more substantial shielding.

The other thing that has an effect on a space traveler is the fact that during extended weightlessness neurons are lost in the brain and explains why we haven’t sent anything other than robots to other bodies in the sky.

Except that people have indeed spent hundreds of days continuously inhabiting space stations such as Mir or ISS without significant ill effect. The main reason we have not yet sent anyone to Mars (for example) is cost (there are also some huge technical challenges to be overcome but Apollo has shown that this is not insurmountable).

I for one will believe the story when I actually see, through a telescope, the debris we supposedly left on the moon: Seeing is believing, and no, I’m not from Missouri, but they have a good motto…

Then you’re a fool. What makes you expect that we have telescopes that are powerful enough to resolve, from Earth, artefacts on the Moon that are a mere 3 m square? From 240,000 miles away, that is very very fine indeed. The equation to determine the resolution of a telescope is freely available on the web. Go and do the calculations (first there’s a bit of trigonometry to work out the angular size of an object at a known distance, then there’ll be the calculation to work out the minimum necessary size of objective mirror for the ‘scope to resolve it).

There’s another aspect to this, of course. If you don’t believe the photographs that the astronauts took, why would you believe an image from a telescope? Large, expensive telescopes don’t have eyepieces you can look through – they have CCD detectors connected to computers.

But still, let’s not have knee-jerk reactions. As a little exercise in maintaining objectivity, I invite you all to imagine that you’re living in East Berlin in the spring of 1961. You’ve heard rumors that sometime in late summer the Soviets are going to build a wall cutting Germany in half and surrounding West Berlin. Do you think there’s any truth to these rumors? Then congratulations, you are now a conspiracy theorist.

Just sayin’.

~Straniero

[Blush]

“Facts are stubborn things” — John Adams

- Jack