Laws: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 174-180

 When I started this book, I thought I’d be dealing with more “evidence.” So far, there’s been very little and there’s not that much left in the book itself. We enter into the last leg of this journey titled “Common Sense Questions” and I just know that this is going to end up being the “just asking questions” part of the book. What we begin with is not a good sign, “There is an old Greek saying from the 1st century BC. ‘False in part, false in the whole.’”

I am a philosopher this is not a Greek saying. It’s a Greek concept, but it only pertains to logical and mathematical reasoning. The Pythagorean theorem doesn’t work if part of it is false. A syllogism doesn’t work if a premise is false. Thus, the respective proofs of both will not be valid. The concept here involves logical necessity. Historical events do not apply.

Another issue is that common sense considerations involve common sense, which is neither common nor sense. Let’s ask the locals what they think about jet propulsion, and let’s see how well that works out. Am I being an elitist? Yes, but it’s important to be an elitist when we’re dealing with rocket science.

We start our common sense excursion with the Lunar Lander, called the LM or the LEM. For the purposes of this post, we’re going with LM. If you’ve seen the LM it looks odd, Kaysing describes it as “top-heavy thus unstable.” Which is true, on Earth. On the Moon, where the gravity is less, being top heavy is less of a burden.

He writes this interesting part, “Armstrong was nearly killed in the Texas simulator. Again, would a reasonable person expect an untried device to work THE FIRST TIME without prior practice or proof that it WOULD work?” (all caps are Kaysing’s)

First time? In the previous sentence he mentions that simulator. Armstrong was trained on the simulator. Flying it would be a matter of exercising those sessions. Earlier he says that during Apollo II there was continuous sideways motion, which means it’s unflyable apparently, but he’s pulling the conspiracy theorists’ bait and switch here. There’s no Apollo II flight. After the Apollo 1 tragedy, the decision was made to skip missions 2-3, the numbering resumes at Apollo 4. 4-6 are unmanned, but the LM is tested in V. It’s not tested with a crew until Apollo IX. In X it does a practice descent to the Moon but never touches down. We have to guess that he means either V, IX, or X. Sideways flight means that he probably is referring to IX, but that sideways flight would only look like that because of the parallax effect against the Earth as it never left orbit. There’s no indication that the LM would not be able to land on the Moon. We must remember that it doesn’t really fly, it slowly descends. Once released the LM just corrects itself rather than fly like airplane.

The errors continue, “why not use that expertise to land on the White House lawn in the Command Capsule?” Because that’s profoundly stupid. The capsule isn’t the LM so we’re comparing something designed to land in the water with something designed to land on the Moon. The capsule has no landing pads or gear.

There are two things that I can say that Kaysing doesn’t understand, gravity and thermodynamics. If he truly understood either of them then he’s lying in this book. There is no third part. The force of gravity, and the lack of it, explain everything he’s trying to say here. The force is weaker in space and on the Moon so we don’t need the same structural support and propulsion systems on Earth. Very smart people worked on this and considered all of these factors. When Kaysing comments that he had witnessed several rockets explode he fails to understand that each explosion taught the actual scientists and engineers applied to subsequent rockets.

I must add a third thing that Kaysing doesn’t understand: Newtonian physics. The book brings us to a “fact” familiar to this conspiracy theory: “In actuality, the blast of the descent engine, straining to support the ton and a half structure, would have scoured the landing area to bed rock or at the least, to a significant depth.”

I must confess that this was something that made me curious in my dumber days. Even in my full conspiracy theorist time, I never bought into Moon landing denial, but this gave me some pause. Then I looked up the reason for this and it’s very simple. In space, there’s nothing to push against. Kaysing is one of those morons that thinks the fire going out of the rocket has to push against something to go forward. As if the booster rocket, when it lights pushes against the Earth and that is what makes the rocket go forward. What makes the rocket go forward is the explosion of fuel being directed outward. If there were no direction, it would merely blow up in a ball.

When the rocket’s force is directed out, it hits air. Those air particles move and disturb the grass, dirt, rock, etc. Which then, in turn, hit other things. On the moon there is no atmosphere, so the force dissipates immediately with only some errant particles being ejected from the rocket to hit the moon. Further, because there is atmosphere the laws of thermodynamics take over, the heat has no place to transfer too. Much like sound, heat needs a medium to transfer through. Kaysing is correct in that the rocks would be cracked after being exposed to the heat of the rockets and then subjected to super cooling of the vacuum of space, but they didn’t get heated.

The only laws that Kaysing is willing to agree that work are “Nature sides with a hidden flaw,” and “if a thing can go wrong, it will, at the worst possible moment.” These aren’t laws, they are confirmation bias. Something never goes wrong at the right moment, and if the flaw wasn’t hidden it would be fixed. All of the problems of the space program thus far, led to the success of the 11 landing. The list of 25 “failures” that we are told are proof that 11 couldn’t have been a success are a wide variety of issues. We’re told about Mariner H(8) which had a vehicle failure, ok but there were nine other mariner missions which were successful. We’re told about the INTELSAT III which suffered a control system failure, and which is why no one was ever able to put a satellite in space afterward.

The problem here is a general one in the conspiracy theory world. Things either have to work completely perfect every time or they must always fail. The idea of progress doesn’t work for them because they’ve all been sold the story of ingenuity that comes in perfect bursts. The Wright brothers “flew” a plane at Kitty Hawk but Kaysing doesn’t understand the work that went into the project prior to that day. He wants to believe that he can unravel this secret all at once because that that’s the story he thinks history is based on. Next week we’ll take a look at the idea that moon rocks aren’t real.