Wagging the Moondoggie, Part 14

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Wagging the Moondoggie, Part XIV

Yeah, I know, I know – a lot of you were expecting, and have been waiting somewhat patiently for, and
have probably even been promised, a new installment of the Laurel Canyon series. And I will readily admit
that I did say, with the launch of the last Apollo installment, that I was done with this topic for now. But how
was I supposed to know that just four months after that launch, it would be announced, albeit so quietly
that almost all of you probably missed it, that we will be boldly taking another stab at sending men to the
Moon?!

So no, we have not quite resumed our journey through Laurel Canyon, but because I’m all about the
giving, we’re going to take one more quick trip to the Moon! And on the way there, there is a very high
probability that we will encounter some advertisements. Because, like I said, I’m all about the giving. And I
thought to myself the other day, “what more can I give them?,” and the answer that I came up with was, “I
know! I’ll randomly and rather awkwardly insert some cool ads!”

Anyway, as I noted in the last Apollo post, “whenever NASA types talk about going ‘back’ to the Moon,”
they invariably seem to “unintentionally raise questions about the legitimacy of the Apollo missions.” And
sure enough, the boys over at Lockheed Martin (one of NASA’s longtime partners-in-crime) certainly didn’t
let me down in that regard with this latest proposal.

Before proceeding, I should probably first clarify here that the proposed missions are not so ambitious as
to involve actually landing on the Moon. No, these proposed missions involve merely flying to the Moon’s
far side and then sort of hanging out in Lunar orbit for a couple of weeks. In other words, all of the most
technologically demanding aspects of the alleged Apollo missions – like actually landing on the Moon,
surviving on the Moon, lifting off from the Moon, and docking while in Lunar orbit – have been eliminated.

Even these far less ambitious missions, of course, won’t actually happen – but let’s play along while
Space.com’s “Space Insider Columnist,” Leonard David, fills us in on what we have to look forward to
(“Mission Proposed to Send Astronauts to the Moon’s Far Side,” November 23, 2010):

“While NASA has officially given up its plans to send humans back to the surface of the moon anytime
soon, a contractor is proposing a mission to send a crew to a stationary spot in orbit over the far side of
Earth's neighbor. Lockheed Martin has begun pitching an L2-Farside Mission using its Orion spacecraft
under development … The Earth-moon L2 Lagrange point is where the combined gravity of the Earth and
the moon allows a spacecraft to hover over one spot and be synchronized with the moon in its orbit around
the Earth. From a halo orbit around that L2 point, a crew would control robots on the lunar surface.
Teleoperated science tasks include snagging rock specimens for return to Earth from the moon's South
Pole-Aitken basin – one of the largest, deepest, and oldest craters in the solar system – as well as deploy
a radio telescope array on the farside.”

Everybody got all of that? Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? After all, the bar has been set substantially lower
than it was in the glorious 1960s, when we easily mastered such things as landing men on the Moon,
walking on the Moon, driving dune buggies on the Moon, and playing golf on the Moon. Nevertheless,
there are some potential problems – just as there are, as is usually the case, some aspects of these
proposed missions that directly contradict the entrenched, though slightly insane, belief that we sent men
to the Moon back in the days when telephones were heavy enough to be used as lethal weapons.

Let’s begin with one of the stated benefits of these proposed missions, as listed in a Lockheed Martin
‘white paper’ and laid out by Daniel Bates of the UK’s Daily Mail (“Astronauts to be Sent to the Far Side of
the Moon for First Time in 40 Years in Pre-Mars Mission,” November 25, 2010): “Both [NASA and
Lockheed Martin] would also have the chance to address the problem of a higher re-entry speed which is
accumulated on trips further away from the Earth.”

There they go again, pretending as though we’ve never done this before! Already we have heard from
NASA types about how we haven’t yet solved the radiation problem, and how we haven’t yet developed
spacesuit materials capable of withstanding the temperature extremes on the Moon, and how we haven’t
yet solved the problem of how to deal with all that Lunar dust … and now we find that we apparently also
haven’t yet worked out how to deal with the fact that spacecraft returning from the Moon would have to
survive much higher re-entry speeds than spacecraft returning from low-Earth orbit! And I’m guessing that
we might also have a problem with controlling the all-important reentry angle.

At this point, I really am beginning to wonder if there is any of that classic 1960s space technology that
hasn’t been lost? Perhaps NASA needs to hire a crack team of archeologists to dig through their
warehouses. Another problem arises from the proposed duration and timeline of the missions. According to
Space.com, “Each flight would prove out the Orion capsule’s life support systems for one-month duration
missions.” Later in the same article, we find that on each mission, our fearless astronauts “would orbit the
L2 point for about two weeks.” It would appear then that Lockheed and NASA are allowing a full two weeks
to travel to and from the Moon – which would be all well and good were it not for the obvious fact that it is
roughly twice the time that it took for the mighty Apollo craft to allegedly get to the Moon and back!

The 1960s was, as some will surely recall, the era of ‘muscle cars,’ so perhaps it was the era of ‘muscle
spaceships’ as well. But since we have now apparently sacrificed raw power in favor of fuel economy, I
guess today’s spaceships just don’t burn rubber like the spacecraft of the wild and wooly ‘60s – though
there is, I suppose, an alternative explanation: the last forty years of space research has taught us that it
would actually take twice as long to get to the Moon as was believed back when we faked the Apollo
flights.

According to Josh Hopkins of Lockheed Martin, in order to achieve the not-so-lofty goal of sending men out
to orbit the Moon, the company’s Human Spaceflight Advanced Programs division has “come up with a
sequence of missions that [they]’ve named ‘Stepping Stones,’ which begins with flights in low Earth orbit
and incrementally builds.” Lockheed views the first Orion missions as “feasible by 2016 to 2018.”

Do I really need to belabor the point that, back in the days when mankind was transitioning from the use of
stone tools, we didn’t need any ‘stepping stones’ to get to the Moon – the very first manned launch of an
Apollo craft allegedly flew its crew all the way there and back without a hitch! And do I also need to once
again point out that, despite setting our sights much lower, and despite having vastly improved technology
to work with, and despite having an additional fifty years of spaceflight experience, it will still take just as
long to get men near the Moon as it did in the 1960s to actually walk on the Moon?

Returning now to the alleged benefits of running these missions, we find that Lockheed’s ‘white paper’ also
talks about being able to “measure astronauts’ radiation dose from cosmic rays and solar flares to verify
that Orion provides sufficient protection, as it is designed to do. Currently the medical effects of deep
space radiation are not well understood, so a one-month mission would improve our understanding
without exposing astronauts to excessive risk.”
So despite the fact that some forty-three years have now passed since we first allegedly sent men into
deep space, we still don’t really know anything about the effects of deep space radiation … but we are
pretty sure, apparently, that a thirty-day dosage is a good, safe place to start! And just to be on the safe
side, we could always pull Buzz and Neil out of retirement to pilot the first flight. They can’t have too many
years left in them anyway.

In all seriousness, NASA initially considered for the Apollo missions, according to “To The Moon” (a Time-
Life Book), “men doomed by fatal disease.” Also considered were “midget[s], to cut the payload weight.”
They said it, not me. I would have used a more politically correct term. Imagine though, if NASA had
followed through on that idea, what kind of records could have been set in the Midget Toss?

One final curious aspect of these latest proposed missions that we need to delve into was explained by
Space.com: “The robotic lander and rover would be launched first on a slow but efficient trajectory to the
moon, to ensure that the rover is on its way before risking the crew launch.”

Say what?! Are you kidding me? What kind of girly-men are these new breed of astronauts? Stepping
stones? Supplemental launches before “risking the crew”? Can’t we just find some real men like John
Glenn and Alan Shepard to pilot the Orion craft? And what is this nonsense about a “slow but efficient
trajectory to the moon”? “Efficient” in what way? Last time I checked, the ‘debunkers’ were still claiming that
getting to the Moon was pretty much a matter of just free-falling your way there. What could be more
efficient than that?

Oh wait … I remember now. As I pointed out in the last Apollo post, getting to the Moon does not actually
involve free-falling. It involves battling the Earth’s gravity by flying in ever-increasing ellipses. And burning
lots and lots of fuel. And Lockheed’s oblique reference to a “slow but efficient trajectory” is, in fact, a
confirmation of that. And so, by the way, is this artist’s conception of the proposed Orion missions, which
shows the spacecraft outside of low-Earth orbit and yet clearly still burning its engines.
Following the launch of the lander and rover (both of
which, it will be recalled, stored easily aboard the
Apollo flights), “three astronauts would be launched
in an Orion spacecraft. If NASA has built a heavy lift
launch vehicle by then, it would be capable of
launching the crew directly to the moon. If that mega-
booster is a no-show, smaller rockets can be used
instead, but a more complex arrangement would be
required. First, Orion would be launched to low-Earth
orbit on a rocket such as a Delta 4 Heavy. Then, a
modified Centaur upper stage would launch on a
separate rocket. Orion would dock to the Centaur
stage in orbit, and the Centaur would boost Orion
toward the moon.”

To briefly recap then, we now know that getting three

And even after all of that, needles to say, we won’t be actually landing men on the Moon. That would
probably require an additional ten years of baby-steps and the launch of at least five spacecraft. And since
we’ll be checking out the far side on these proposed missions, we still won’t be able to verify all those
Apollo artifacts supposedly littering the Moon. Which is really kind of a moot point, because we won’t
actually be going at all.

Speaking of the far side of the Moon, by the way, the Daily Mail noted that the “surface was first
photographed by Luna 3, a Soviet probe, in 1959 then the Apollo 8 mission followed in 1968 but there has
been scant exploration of it since.” Translation: there has been no exploration of the far side since 1959,
and it would be nice if the Daily Mail would throw in a comma now and then.

But enough about that. Let’s move on to a different topic. Remember how I argued that if it were possible
to send crews to the Moon, private enterprise would have a strong financial incentive to have done so to
exploit any available resources? And remember how the ‘debunkers,’ not surprisingly, claimed that there
was nothing much on the Moon to see or do, especially since the strip club was shut down over some
zoning dispute, so there was not really any compelling reason to go back? Well, it turns out – and this is
quite shocking – that the ‘debunkers’ may be lying once again. As the LA Times reported on April 8, 2011
(W.J. Hennigan “MoonEx Aims to Scour Moon for Rare Materials”):

“A team of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are shooting for the moon with a new private venture
aimed at scouring the lunar surface for precious metals and rare metallic elements. The private company
Moon Express Inc., or MoonEx, is building robotic rovers alongside scientists at NASA’s Ames Research
Center northwest of San Jose. MoonEx’s machines are designed to look for materials that are scarce on
Earth but found in everything from a Toyota Prius car battery to guidance systems on cruise missiles.
While there is no guarantee the moon is flush with these materials, MoonEx officials think it may be a ‘gold
mine’ of so-called rare earth elements.”

The company won’t, naturally enough, be sending any human cargo to the Moon, because that isn’t really
possible, but the point here is that there are in fact compelling reasons for ‘return’ flights to the Moon, for
both financial and scientific gain, so there is no validity at all to the argument that no one has been back for
some forty years simply because there is no reason to go back.

Let’s briefly return now to Operation Fishbowl, which was also discussed in the last Apollo offering.
Unbeknownst to me until very recently, NPR decided to dredge up the nearly fifty-year-old high-altitude
nuke tests less than two weeks before I did (Robert Krulwich “A Very Scary Light Show: Exploding H-
Bombs In Space,” July 1, 2010). And the facts they brought to the table were rather compelling.

“If you are wondering why anybody would deliberately detonate an H-bomb in space, the answer comes
from a conversation we had with science historian James Fleming of Colby College.” According to
Fleming, who has been busily reading through James Van Allen’s papers while working on a biography, “a
good entry point to the story is May 8, 1958, when James Van Allen, the space scientist, stands in front of
the National Academy in Washington, D.C., and announces that they’ve just discovered something new
about the planet.”

What Van Allen’s team had discovered, of course, was that Earth is ringed by belts of high-energy
particles, now known as the Van Allen radiation belts. And what Fleming’s recent research revealed,
incredibly enough, is that the “day after the press conference, [Van Allen] agreed with the military to get
involved with a project to set off atomic bombs in the magnetosphere to see if they could disrupt it.” Let’s
pause here for a moment to reflect on the almost unfathomable level of megalomania at play here:
immediately upon learning of the existence of the radiation belts, the military/intelligence complex decided,
without even giving it much thought, that it would be a great idea to attack said belts with atomic weapons!
And the ‘scientist’ who had made the discovery immediately agreed that that was a swell idea! As Fleming
noted, “this is the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and
immediately decided to blow it up.”

Never mind that the belts are there to shield the planet from incoming space radiation, and that their
existence is one of the primary reasons that biological lifeforms can thrive on this sphere … let’s just see if
we can blow a big fucking hole in them! It apparently never occurred to the geniuses in Washington that if
you blow a hole in the belts to, say, allow for the safe passage of spacecraft, you would also presumably
allow for the unsafe passage of massive amounts of incoming, and very lethal, radiation.

This, dear readers, says a lot about the true nature of the men who rule behind the curtain. What hubris is
required to put at risk every living creature on this planet, and do so without even giving it a second
thought, for the dubious purpose of facilitating space missions that were never going to actually take
place? And bear in mind, by the way, that these ‘tests’ took place during the tenure of a nearly mythical
figure known as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. For those then who are inclined to believe that the sitting
President actually calls the shots, I would suggest taking a little time to contemplate why it is that the man
who many consider to have been a knight-in-shining-armor was the man who gave the thumbs-up to the
most recklessly arrogant nuclear weapons tests ever conceived?

The first such tests were conducted in 1958, almost immediately after the discovery of the radiation bands.
But those tests used just lowly ol’ atom bombs, and according to NPR, “Atom bombs had little effect on the
magnetosphere.” Which is why in 1962, the powers-that-be decided to up the ante by using hydrogen
bombs … really, really big hydrogen bombs. How big? Starfish Prime, the most ‘successful’ of the ‘tests,’
was tipped with a warhead 100 times as powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima!

As detailed by NPR, “The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth’s
atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb’s radiation would make it harder to
see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to
objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow!
for example); and – most peculiar – d) if a man-made explosion might ‘alter’ the natural shape of the belts.
The scientific basis for these proposals is not clear.”

Objective “a” roughly translates to: “we had to do it to protect ourselves from those crazy Russkies!” Those
with atypically long memories may recall that before the collapse of the international Communist threat
neatly coincided with the rise of the international Terrorist threat, that was pretty much the all-purpose
excuse for all manner of heinous activities undertaken by the Western powers. The main problem here
though is that Starfish Prime was detonated at an altitude of 250 miles, roughly 50 miles beyond low-Earth
orbit, and I’m reasonably certain that Soviet ICBMs weren’t designed to fly at anywhere near that altitude.

Moving on to “b,” I feel fairly confident in saying that even back in 1962, at the tender age of two, I could
have provided an answer to that question, and that answer would have been: “Yes, detonating a very large
hydrogen bomb will cause extensive collateral damage. Duh!”

Proceeding to “c,” I’m afraid I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with NPR on its decision to label “d”
as the most peculiar. Attempting to take out Moscow in a nuclear holocaust redirected through the Van
Allen belts has to rank pretty high up on the peculiarity scale. And what would be the point? Plausible
deniability? “Looky what just happened to Moscow! It’s as if God himself struck a blow against the Evil
Empire! I damn sure know we didn’t do it!”

As for “d,” altering the natural shape of the belts appears to have been the primary goal. Because as we all
know, man can always improve upon the natural order of things. And it was immediately apparent, right
from the time of their discovery, that the shape of the belts was entirely wrong for this planet. Sure, they
would have been fine for, say, Mars or Venus – or even Pluto, before it was rudely kicked out of the
Fraternity of Planets – but they were clearly unfit to circle this planet. So we had to try to fix them.

Luckily, we failed.

And with that, I really am now over my Apollo obsession. See you all back in Laurel Canyon!