Ancient Aliens on the Moon (23 page)

It’s hard to know just how to respond to this one beyond simply stating that it is wrong. As you can see from the artist’s concept below, the astronauts were positioned on either side of the central cockpit panel, with the main EVA door between them. There was in fact plenty of room to open the hatch. On Apollo 11, Armstrong would have been manning the left position in this view and Aldrin the right. The door was latched to Aldrin’s side, necessitating that the door be swung open inward, and effectively “trapping” Aldrin momentarily on his side of the LM. In fact, this is the main reason that Armstrong went out first. Once he was out, Aldrin was able to close the hatch, move over to Armstrong’s position, and exit the LM himself.

Diagram of LEM cockpit interior.

Buzz Aldrin exiting the LM.

As to the issue of whether the astronauts could fit through the hatch, as you can see, they must have. This is a photo taken from a film shot by Armstrong of Aldrin egressing the Lunar Module. The entire sequence is available from the NASA archives, and shows the whole procedure from start to finish, including Aldrin opening the hatch and crawling through it.

Furthermore, if it turns out that the astronauts could not fit through the hatch, this will come as quite a shock to our friend and contributor Ken Johnston, Jr. He spent many hours in the vacuum chamber at Houston, fully suited up including the backpack, crawling in and out of the full scale mockup of the LM, to test exactly that. He’ll be very upset to learn that he wasted all that sweat for nothing.

Claim 8 – The Lunar Rover
was
too big to fit in the LM.

Well, this is strictly true if you take the measurements of the Rover when it was fully deployed and assembled. However, the Rover came packed into a very tight little package which fit neatly into the space provided in the LM.

To deploy the Rover, all the astronauts had to do was pull on two nylon cords and the it popped right out of its berth and down to the lunar surface. As it did so, the wheels, which were folded over (as you can see in the photograph above) deployed outward and were then locked into position. The main purveyor of this claim that the Rover was too big to fit into the LM is Collier, who took his measurements by going to the Johnson Space Center (where there is a full scale mockup of the Rover in its deployed configuration) and then compared those numbers to the containment bay on the LM. Anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of engineering could have figured this one out—simply by looking at the hinges which allowed the wheels to fold out when deployed. This whole aspect of the controversy could have been avoided by a trip to the film archives which have plenty of footage from the Apollo missions showing the astronauts actually unfolding and deploying the Rover on the Moon.

Diagram of Lunar Rover stowage and deployment.

Claim 9 – The astronauts could not get from the Command module to the Lunar module with their space suits and pack on.

Again, strictly true. They never did go from the CSM to the LM and back with their packs on for one very good reason—they didn’t have to. The back packs were stored in the Lunar Module the whole time. Beyond that, they did not wear their packs at all until they actually went out on their moon walks.

As a further side note on this, Aldrin has told the story in recent years that during the process of putting on their backpacks for the first Moon walk, one of them inadvertently broke off the arming toggle switch for the ascent stage’s main engine. Had Aldrin not used a ball point pen he was carrying to flip the switch to the armed position, he and Armstrong would have been stranded and died on the lunar surface.

Claim 10 – There can’t be any pictures taken on the Moon because the film would melt in the 250° temperatures.

Any normal film exposed to 250° would indeed melt at that temperature. There are only two problems with this Moon Hoax claim—this was no ordinary off the shelf film, and it was never exposed to those kinds of temperatures in the cameras.

The 70mm film used in the Hasselblad cameras the astronauts carried was a very special transparency film designed specifically (under a NASA contract) for hostile environments like the Moon. According to Peter Vimislik at Kodak, the film would at worst begin to soften at 200° F, and would not melt until it reached at least 500° F. So, a worst case scenario of 250-280° F for a totally uninsulated, non-reflective camera would still be well within the film’s operational parameters. The film itself, in terms of its light- gathering abilities, was also quite amazing. It was a special extended range color slide film called “XRC” that allowed the astronauts to take perfect National Geographic quality pictures on the lunar surface, even though they were hardly experienced photographers. This has truly opened up whole web pages of controversy—with the Moon Hoaxers claiming that such a film simply doesn’t exist In fact, Richard Hoagland actually used many rolls of this super lunar film, back when he was advising Walter Cronkite at CBS.

In addition, the cameras were also protected inside a special case designed to keep them cool. Although it is true that in the direct, airless sunlight the temperature can reach upwards of 250° – 280° Fahrenheit because there is no air, it’s also fairly easy to keep cool for the same reason. The situation is a lot different than in your oven, for instance. With no convection or conduction, the only type of heat that is of concern on the Moon is radiative. The best way to reflect radiative heat is to wrap the object (like a camera or person) in layers designed to reflect as much heat as possible, usually by simply being colored white. Most all of the astronaut’s clothing and the camera casing were indeed white, which very efficiently directed heat away from the both the astronauts and camera film.

Claim 11 – The LM engine was very powerful. How come it did not leave a crater below the spacecraft? Why didn’t it kick up any dust when it landed?

The truth here is once again very straightforward. At all of the landing sites, the astronauts found that the lunar surface had about a two inch layer of dust. Below that was pretty much hard pan. As you can see from the image below from Apollo 11, not only is the upper layer of dust blown away in a radial pattern (as if from a thruster?) there is also a small depression below the nozzle. Since the LM descent engine only made about 3,000 pounds of thrust (compared to a modern jet fighter which makes between 18,000 and 22,000 pounds of thrust), this is pretty much as any engineer or geologist would expect things to look.

Blast pattern from Lunar Module descent engine.

And what of the charge that no dust was kicked up by the LM as it descended? Again, we’d recommend any of the fine NASA videos on the Apollo program. They show that in each and every case, the LM did indeed create a literally blinding swirl of dust blown radially outward from under the descending LM, as it groped its way down, balanced on its 3000-lb thrust engine, to its final lunar resting place. You simply have to be willing to find the films and watch them.

Claim 12 – The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen belts and solar flares.

Actually, of all the issues put forth by the Moon Hoax advocates, this is the one that requires the most digging into. The Van Allen radiation belts are a pair of toroidal (donut-shaped) belts of high-energy electrons and ions trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field. Any object leaving Earth’s orbit to visit the Moon or beyond must pass through them. The inner region is centered at about 1,865 miles above Earth and has a thickness of about 3,100 miles. The outer region is centered at about 9,300 – 12,500 miles above the surface of the Earth and has a thickness of between 3,700 – 6,200 miles. According to a document called “Radiation Plan for the Apollo Lunar Mission,”
¹
the radiation in the belts was of
some
concern to the scientists working on the problem. However, they actually considered a rogue solar flare to be a much bigger problem.

The Van Allen radiation belts.

In fact, as stated in this official government report, the scientists working on the problem of Van Allen radiation considered it to be minor compared to other design hurdles to be conquered. Protection against the radiations of the Van Allen belts was a complex problem recognized long before Apollo or even before the advent of manned space flight. Prior to 1958, scientists knew that ions and electrons could be trapped within Earth’s magnetic field. 1957 and 1958 were designated as the “International Geophysical Year”—a time in which the first artificial satellites were launched by both America and the Soviet Union for the first overall surveys of the Earth from space. The Soviet’s Sputnik and America’s Explorer I (the latter instrumented by James Van Allen) were both launched in 1957, and 1958, respectively. Explorer I carried Van Allen’s Geiger counters to observe cosmic rays, but the instruments mysteriously appeared only to work at the lower altitudes of its elliptical orbit. Explorer III followed two months later with more sophisticated instruments, and detected very high levels of radiation. Vast numbers of energetic particles were detected hitting the counters at higher altitudes, and in specific, belt shaped regions. These “belts” (which had literally saturated Explorer I’s more limited detectors, accounting for their apparent failure to detect the belts at higher altitudes) were eventually recognized as doughnut shaped regions where both protons and electrons are trapped within Earth’s magnetic field. Particles within the belts were seen to spiral around the Earth’s magnetic lines of force, therefore changing orientation continuously in relation to a moving spacecraft.