Elements: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 22-27

 What we know about Bill Kaysing is that he used to work at Rocketdyne, originally a division of North American Aviation, that built a variety of rocket engines for both military and non-military use (i.e. ICBMs and Space Missions). As I pointed out a few posts ago, Kaysing is not specific about what it is that he did there. He’s closer to the Moon Program more than any of the other chuckle heads that claim it was faked, but this could very well be a case of false authority. Bob Lazar, the fake Area-51 whistle blower, claimed to have worked at Los Alamos—but he did so as a photography developer. The implication that Kaysing wants us to gain is that he worked on the rockets or that he is some kind of engineer.

This is the “natural flavors” problem. If you look on a carton of orange juice you’ll find a description that says something like “includes natural flavors.” Most people assume that “natural flavors” means “oranges,” but it doesn’t. At least, it doesn’t necessarily. However, think about it for a second: if that natural flavoring was actual oranges, the company would brag about it. If Kaysing had direct experience working on these rockets, it would be shocking for him to not mention it.

This chapter is called “Elements of Rocket Propulsion” and he’s trying to leverage his work at Rocketdyne into a foundation for the larger conspiracy theory. I have to give credit where its due, the order of this book makes sense. Yes, lay out the foundation for the phenomenon before we get to the conspiracy theory. This is refreshing after Cooper’s book.

He begins in China, where rockets were discovered “around 100AD.” His dates are a little off, but I think that may be what people thought then. It’s not that the Chinese were the first to use rockets though, the Greeks had steam powered rocket-like devices; but the important innovation of the Chinese was the propellant. The Greek invention required furnaces to generate steam to create the pressure, this means it wasn’t portable in any way. The Chinese invention of gunpowder allowed rockets to be carried and moved. It also allowed them to get smaller, which, for some reason is always the path to development.

Instead of a long history of rockets we skip from the Chinese to Robert Goddard. I mentioned Goddard last post. He was the pioneer whose paper “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes” is the literal starting point for the idea that rockets could reach space. Before that, the thought was cannons. Read Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon,” the capsule is launched via a supergun that would absolutely have liquified the passengers due to the sudden acceleration.

“He achieved most of the initial successes in this field. His efforts did not escape the attention of the war-oriented Germans.”

Is this a racist statement? I’m very confused by my feelings that we should impugn an entire race even if that race is German.

Kaysing retreads familiar ground with von Braun, the Nazis, and the V-2. I have a feeling that my overall complaint fort his book is that it is going to be repetitive. I’ll repeat that the V-2 was an overall ineffective weapon. It did little damage to the Allied war effort. In fact, it may have actually helped the war effort because it was a drain on resources. The V-2 was an effective terror weapon though. It made no sound and there was no defence against it. It’s a good thing it was terribly inaccurate.

We got some “Paperclip” reference to the US OSS (Office of Secret Services) effort to get the Nazi scientists into the US. To Kaysing’s credit he also mentions that the Russians did the exact same thing—which is usually and conspicuously ignored by most conspiracy theorists.

Then things get a bit weird, needlessly so. Kaysing follows with four images. One is the Rocketdyne facility, the other three are photographs of the tests. In the captions he comments, “few people, other than employees, have ever visited the Propulsion Field Laboratory hidden in the Simi Hills above the San Fernando Valley;” “The majority of the population were unaware of exactly what was taking place at the Field Laboratory;” “None of this information ever reached the American public;” and “The residents of the nearby San Fernando Valley were not told of the nature or the danger of his type of testing.”

Kaysing’s problem seems to be that government kept a top-secret military project, secret. I suppose you could make the case that there should be no secrets in a Democratic government, but then you have to make that case. Kaysing isn’t doing that, he’s just trying to make us angry about the secrecy.

We are then treated to explanation of why rocket science is so difficult that we use the term “rocket scientist” sarcastically when someone does something extremely stupid. The problem is stability, when the fuel burns it creates vibrations. He frames those vibrations in sound terminology as high as 150db. I have no idea if this is true and I’m going to accept it as true (I have a friend who works on acoustic problems for NASA with regard to the suits/helmets that the astronauts wear)—sound isn’t a problem that we think of, but sound is just vibrations and that’s a problem. What Kaysing explains is that the vibrations cause resonant effects in the stored fuel as it burns. This can cause the burning to focus in particular areas and rupture the engine.

This is a problem, but it’s an engineering problem which can be solved. It’s not a theory problem like faster-than-light travel. We are told that there were many failures, explosions, and premature engine cut-offs due to “incipient disaster.” I think we are supposed to accept this as a terminal problem, but this is progress so I don’t understand his point even when he expressly says it, “My point is this: if the Atlas couldn’t achieve reliability after almost a decade of development, how could a far larger and more powerful rocket engine be successful?”

That’s like saying because an Apple II computer didn’t have enough memory to process a picture of itself, that my phone shouldn’t be able to process any picture.

He closes the chapter asking: “Was the problem solved? Was it partially solved? Answers to these questions will not be forthcoming until NASA makes these data available to the public.”

I can answer them, “Yes,” and “No, they were completely solved.” I know this because not only did we achieve rocket flight to outer space, but also to the Moon. Kaysing is committing a bait-and-switch. The question we don’t have the answer to is “how they solved the problem.” We cannot accept the conspiracy theory as true, not until he lays out the evidence. This is begging the question: the moon landing didn’t happen because of this problem, we know it’s a problem because the moon landing didn’t happen. In order to accept the alternate explanation though, we need more than just this rhetorical trick.