Was the Moon Landing an Hoax?

Surely they would use America's most trusted 4x4 tire?

Supercheap have got compressors on special for fathers day. If they don't work on the moon, you can get your money back.

You obviously haven't zoomed right in for a close look on Google Moon

moon.google.com

Dave

lmao

Mmm. Thought you would. I did.

Dave

me too...hahaha....well at least granddad was right

That site is a hoax because it shows that the cheese is Edam and we all know that it was Blue Vien Cheese

No more words about blue-veiners, Des :-) This is a family site.....

That link is a classic.

Thanks geocacher.

Mmmmm.......All the people from Australia's Parkes Observatory, who played a key role in capturing and broadcasting the video signals must have been in on it too!

Not to also mention Siding Springs and Tidbinbilla. My next door neighbour in Cooma is a bloke by the name of John Boyd. He was there. I spend fascinating hours upon hours talking to him about it. Great stuff.

It was actually Honeysuckle, not Parkes that the original TV was downlinked. "The Dish" was incorrect. :-)

See here: A Tribute To Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station

True - HSC just beat them while the dish was tipped to zero Dec. waiting for moonrise and the winds to abate.

From the CSIRO:

"As Parkes was the largest telescope to receive television signals from the Moon, it captured more signal and produced better pictures than the receiver at Honeysuckle Creek near Canberra, which received some of the first ten minutes of the EVA. Therefore, Houston switched to Parkes and remained with those pictures for the rest of the 2½-hour broadcast."

Hi Omaroo,

"Trajectory management isn't exeactly...uhmm... rocket science. It's easy and not particulary taxing even on a slide rule if you're quick."

I'd have to agree but the Yanks did screw up their last mission to Mars (the one that crashed) because of a simple metric to imperial conversion error.

Hugh

Yup - mistakes are made.... even those as silly as this one :)

They also kill astronauts - as in the case of using flammable velcro all over the shop in a pure O2 atmosphere..... which killed Grissom, White & Chaffee in Apollo 1 testing.... we live & learn I guess.

hehe.. the computer hardware may not have been... but the software sure was.

>>> The yanks had to beat the Russians at any cost remember ?

BINGO

Chris is right on the money here.
Back in the Apollo moon mission era memory was a million dollars a mega byte. The programmers where real programmers, it was all done in machine language.

One of my old Uni software design texts actually used the lunar lander software as an example of efficient and minimalistic code.
They had their fair share of software problems, just weeks before the launch someone realised the luna lander software believed the moons gravity was a repulsive rather than attractive force!

The Americans where very keen to beat the Russians at all costs and basically just went for it. The problem with conspiracies is people can't keep their mouths shut and you need a bloody lot of people in a big conspiracy like a moon landing.

Geoff.

>>> BINGO

Uhmm... yep - Bingo! Are you saying that you believe in the conspiracy? LOL!

They spent squillions to get there - i.e.at "any cost". If they hadn't of managed to get there who'd do you think the first to complain would be?

The RUSSIANS per chance?????? They would have had a field day if they'd not tracked the whole set of missions - right to the surface. The Cold War would have been over in a flash if the Russians could have proven that the Americans didn't go.

Spot on Geoff :)

There are sites on the net that contain all of the assembly & microcode from every mission - including the most complex of all - the "J" mission that was Apollo 17.

Incredible stuff to see it all run in only kilobyte chunks of contextual, dynamically loaded code. They just don't have to be that clever these days, and sloppy code is OK because it can be.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGc) - brilliant stuff:



Off WIKI:

The Apollo flight computer was the first to use integrated circuits (ICs). The Block I version used 4,100 ICs, each containing a single 3-input NOR logic gate. The later Block II version used dual 3-input NOR gates in a flat-pack; approximately 5,600 gates in all. The gates were made using resistor-transistor logic (RTL). They were interconnected by a technique called wire wrap, in which the circuits are pushed into sockets, the sockets have square posts, and wire is wrapped around the posts. The edges of the posts bite the wire with tons of pressure per square inch, causing gas-tight connections that are more reliable than soldered PC boards. The wiring was then embedded in cast epoxy plastic. The decision to use a single IC design throughout the AGC avoided problems that plagued another early IC computer design, the Minuteman II guidance computer.

The computer's RAM was magnetic core memory (4K words) and ROM was implemented as core rope memory (32K words). Both had cycle times of 12 microseconds. The memory word length was 16 bits; 15 bits of data and 1 odd-parity bit. The CPU-internal 16-bit word format was 14 bits of data, 1 overflow bit, and 1 sign bit (one's complement representation).

Ahhhh. Wire wrap.

I still have wire wrap tools in my shed. Fond memories of days gone by and slinking off from day release apprentice training at RMIT to go to the movies....

Dave

You know Chris, as a crusty old bugger with degree in programming I so agree with you.
The cost of CPU's and memory in the modern world has made efficient code go the way of the Dodo. Sad thing is, efficiency and simplicity makes for useability and reliability.

It truly annoys me the slop that is produced in the modern world and called "good software"

I can actually understand why moon missions succeded in the 60's but haven't been attempted since. There'd be so much bunf in the software it'd barely run!

Geoff.

You know what they say though Geof - the 11th commandment of computing:

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away....

Used to amaze me what could run on a 20MHz Xt with a 1meg of RAM and a maths coprocessor.

WYSIWYG GUI's went and buggered efficiency a long time ago now.

Dave

I saw a program that in mythbusters style dubunked all the so called evidence it was a hoax such as shadows appearing not to be in a straight line suggesting more than 1 light source. the flag supposedly illuminated from behind the light source etc etc etc
Never did like conspiricy theories i think they are unintelligent - i mean who really believes the oil giants still have the magic 50 mpg carby shut up in a vault after they bought out the patent before it sent them broke LMAO

what drugs are you lot on?...i have no idea what your all on about.

Here's me (on the right) on one (IBM System 360 Model 40) in April 1967 - right in amongst it with my dad.

Just for the record - that's my little brother Steven on the left - not my dad ;)

Yep that looks like a system 360 console, was the picture taken in Australia?

No - Poughkeepsie, NY, if I remember rightly...

Hi Omaroo

Was that you stuffing with the wires in that model 360 I was trying to program in 1967.

Naughty boy - caught you at last !

Robin Miller

No. That was my little brother. I just juggled punch cards.

Then I defined Heaven as being a programmer on a system that needed a room full of young female punch card typists.

Robin Miller

Robin "Hollerith" Miller....

LOL!!

Boy,

That brings back memories from the mid seventies when I was a Computer Operator on one of those babies. Looked very impressive with the tape drives moving anywhere from quarter turn at a time to a blurring continuous read. And when you ran out of "disk space" you just swapped another pack in.

The main Operator console was a "typewriter" with a state of the art "golf ball" head. The lights on the front panel of the main display looked very impressive too, but were really used for diagnostic purposes.

As for the card readers and sorters, like wow!

Sand Man - great stuff! I was eventually an IBM engineer in 1980. How could I not be? I used to love those days, as machines were real machines.

The switches were for diag purposes, but their main use was to pre-load the registers with an IPL sequence (Initial Program Load).

Poughkeepsie home of the mainframe....... SYSPROG's still live, I still get enjoyment everytime I IPL our productions systems, something about the power of a mainframe, knowing that thousands of people depend on a system that they don't know exists, because it just works.....

So right llama

The day of the mainframe is returning too. Lots of virtual servers can be efficiently hosted on a single machine with incredible communication channels to boot. Linux hosting companies are going back to System 370 in particular for this.

I was trained on some of the System/370 gear including 3033, 3081, 40xx, 3270, 3700, 8100, 3600 ranges. They were heady days :)

IBM Poughkeepsie:

Those were the days of the truly dedicated Engineers.

One Engineer in particular I remember, would come in at 2am, three parts cut and still fix the problem. We used to keep him primed with coffee while he worked.

We had a great relationship with the Engineers and nothing was too difficult for them.
If they couldn't fix it in 2 hours, it was escalated up the chain until the relevant "expert" was on site and the problem fixed.

Now, our vendors helpdesk gets put through to India and its a major challenge just getting them to understand the problem, let alone assign it to a local technician to look at it .

Spot-on Sand Man :)

We worked like dogs - because that was the work ethic. There was nothing like a bank's IT manager standing over your shoulder whispering... "ten thousand...twenty thousand... thirty thousand...." etc as he counted off the dollars lost in downtime.

IBM was a brilliant company to work for back then. Probably still is. I left in 1984.

thats right...my supercharged 1967 mini had 3 forward 1 reverse....and one (was 1st) that just made a lot of noise when engaged

Yep - Korolev was a genius. I really wonder what would have been for the Russians if politics hadn't gotten in the way of the N1 moon rocker development.





Not to mention the wrong choice of fuels which was the result of cost-cutting and the wrong engineer in charge of engine development. This bloke never got on with Korolev and made sure that this happened:

Sandman, I have been working my way to the bottom of this thread with the intention of making a comment like "It will take them that long to fill out all the appropriate OHSW forms organised by a committee who designed a horse but developed a camel".
I guess I don't have to now

do they have similar OHSW laws as OZ?

They definitely landed on the moon, no doubt. The conspiracy theory doesn't hold true for a number of reasons. Space life is a long way off, hell we have shuttles going up all the time and have delivered probes to Mars so a lot has been accomplished. Space life requires economies of scale and a motive, it doesn't exist now so hang tight for another 400 years..

Capricorn 1 was a great movie

There is. Picture prooves it.

TARNATION!

thanks PK!

That's what I love about this forum - you learn so much that you weren't expecting !

Site Link

Jeff, I think the reason was twofold: The septics achieved their goal of beating the Russians, and the cost vs what new data they'd gather.

If indeed it was a hoax, jeez it was elaborate down to the finest of detail. Back in '86, my future Mrs and I went for a run to the old Honeysuckle (HSK) tracking station (which was sitting abandoned). We went inside, and there on one of the walls in a wood/glass cabinet was a relief of the moon's surface with little flags all over it depicting all the moon landings, both manned and unmanned. I still can't believe that it held such little historical value to have been left there when the station was closed.

I jokingly said to the Mrs that we should souvenir it. Now I wish we did, because not long after the place was completely vandalised, then demolished. :-(

A friend of mine was a USB radio specialist at HSK during Apollo 16/17 and the deep space era that followed. His picture is on the HSK website. He's told me a few stories which I reckon are genuine :-)

My old man and I were talking about this over the campfire a couple of months ago... It's strange how the moon is positioned, how it can generate complete solar eclipses, and the effects that it has on Earth.

If the moon is indeed a hollow metal object, it does beg for some questions. Especially after all the advances we have made, we no longer have any means to put humans on the moon, even if we wanted to - strange. Were we told not to go back there my someone/thing?

There was also talk about the formation of the the craters, and how they don't appear to be consistent with impacts from asteroids etc.

I reckon the whole subject is really fascinating!