RoyLennigan
Registered Senior Member
are you kidding? your entire case is based on an "emotional connection to this subject." you get no respect when your rebuttal starts with calling the other person 'moron'.
will you please stop purposely misunderstanding me? where does magnetosphere equate to an atmosphere? i didn't even say the moon had anything.
i suggest you read this:
http://www.clavius.org/envrad.html
"There is too much radiation in outer space for manned space travel."
This general charge is usually made by people who don't understand very much at all about radiation. After witnessing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the tragedy of Chernobyl it is not surprising that the idea of radiation should elicit an intuitively fearful reaction. But when you understand the different types of radiation and what can be done about them, it becomes a manageable problem to avoid radiation exposure.
"It doesn't matter how difficult or expensive it might have been to falsify the lunar landings. Since it was absolutely impossible to solve the radiation problem, the landings had to have been faked."
This is a common method of argument that attempts to prove something that can't be proven, by disproving something else. In this case the reader is compelled to accept the conspiracy theory and all its attendant problems and improbabilities, simply on the basis that no matter how difficult, absurd, or far-fetched a particular proposition may be, if it's the only alternative to something clearly impossible then it must -- somehow -- have come to pass. This false dilemma is aimed at pushing the reader past healthy skepticism and into a frame of mind where the absurd seems plausible.
The false dilemma is only convincing if the supposedly impossible alternative is made to seem truly impossible. And so conspiracists argue very strenuously that the radiation from various sources spelled absolute doom for the Apollo missions. They quote frightening statistics and cite various highly technical sources to try to establish to the reader that the radiation poses a deadly threat.
But in fact most conspiracists know only slightly more about radiation than the average reader. This means only a very few people in the world can dispute their allegations, and the conspiracists can simply dismiss them as part of the conspiracy.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4009/v1p3e.htm
October 15
The analysis of scientific measurements made by the Ranger III lunar probe showed that gamma-ray intensity in interplanetary space was ten times greater than expected, NASA reported. Measurements were taken by gamma-ray spectrometers on Ranger III after it was launched on January 26. NASA scientists, however, did not believe that gamma-ray intensity was "great enough to require any changes in the design of radiation shielding for manned spacecraft."
New York Times, October 16, 1962.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html#radiation
Bad: A big staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.
Good: Kaysing's exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.''
This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth's surface where the Earth's magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn't enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.
http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/waw/mad/mad19.html
So the effect of such a dose, in the end, would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill. The low-level exposure could possibly cause cancer in the long term. I do not know exactly what the odds on that would be, I believe on the order of 1 in 1000 per astronaut exposed, probably some years after the trip. Of course, with nine trips, and a total of 3 X 9 = 27 astronauts (except for a few, like Jim Lovell, who went more than once) you would expect probably 5 or 10 cancers eventually in any case, even without any exposure, so it is not possible to know which if any might have been caused by the trips.
http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/books/apollo/S2ch3.htm
Radiation doses measured during Apollo were significantly lower than the yearly average of 5 rem[*] set by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for workers who use radioactive materials in factories and institutions across the United States. Thus, radiation was not an operational problem during the Apollo Program. Doses received by the crewmen of Apollo missions 7 through 17 were small because no major solar-particle events occurred during those missions. One small event was detected by a radiation sensor outside the Apollo 12 spacecraft, but no increase in radiation dose to the crewmen inside the spacecraft was detected.
very interesting sites. i suggest you read through as much as you can if you still desire to argue against the moon landings.
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