@morphyms1817 said in #1:
> As a U.S. citizen I always accepted as given that the Apollo landings were authentic.
Well, they (not just Apollo 11, all of them, there were six manned landings in total) were authentic.
It's virtually certain that they were because the Soviets would have been easily able to disprove them if they hadn't been. The Soviets – owing to the vast west to east extent of Russia – were in a position to listen in on the radio transmissions of the landings and to find their source with their radio observatories (telescopes and antennas). The source of the transmission was the moon, the delay was 2.42 to 2.7 seconds (as expected from the lunar distance and the two-way speed of light), everything checked out. If it hadn't Soviet, radio astronomers and physicists would have figured it out and the Soviet Union would certainly not have passed on an opportunity to publicly humiliate their geopolitical cold war rival USA. They would have had a field day with it. It would have been a huge blow to American prestige and reputation worldwide and would have benefitted Soviet foreign policy immensely.
What's more, even amateur radio operators were able to receive the transmission from the moon, here's an article about that:
www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11Then there's extensive photographic evidence (hundreds, thousands of photos), beautiful shots with their amazing Hasselblad cameras:
www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a11/images11.htmlThere's also tangible evidence like lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rockHundreds of geologists have studied them.
And if you know where to aim it, you can use a laser to find the distance to the moon (with great accuracy). Why does that work? Because Apollo astronauts left behind retroreflectors on the lunar surface and indeed, several countries (the Soviet Union was among them, yet another way they could have exposed a hoax) have and had lunar laser ranging stations (since the late 1960s and early 1970s) that consist of a strong laser and an optical telescope receiving the reflected laser signal 2.42 to 2.7 seconds later:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiments> To get started I'll mention one of those lines. He said NASA does not possess technology to protect astronauts sufficiently in space travel to the Moon. I was interested when I looked up now, radiation levels in low Earth orbit (LEO) are much lower than radiation levels as you go farther away from Earth.
Yes, the Van Allen belts exist. Yes, they feature higher levels of ionising radiation than LEO. But unlike astronauts on the ISS, the Apollo astronauts weren't living in the Van Allen belts for months on end. They quickly passed through them in a matter of less than 4 days. One of the first rules in radiation protection is to limit exposure time. They did that.
The astronauts also had radiation shielding. The thin aluminium hull of their spacecraft was already enough to shield them from virtually all external alpha radiation (helium nuclei that quickly lose all of their kinetic energy when colliding with matter, you can shield off alpha radiation with a piece of paper). The only alpha radiation they received would have come from slightly radioactive lunar regolith dust clinging to the outside of their spacesuits.
Of course penetrating types of radiation (like x-rays and gamma radiation, both highly energetic electromagnetic radiation) could not be shielded off. Luckily the sun doesn't emit much of those types of radiation (it's not hot enough for it's blackbody radiation to contain significant amounts of far ultra violet, let alone x-ray and gamma radiation). While there are deep-space sources of x-rays and gamma radiation, their luminosity is comparatively small due to the great distances involved, rendering the dose low enough to be safe for space travel.
To track the radiation they'd received (I presume mostly beta radiation with some gamma radiation and x-rays) they brought dosimeters. At the end of the missions they read values between 1.6 and 11.4 mSv, which is a moderate amount of radiation that's definitely survivable. Look up radiation records to get a feel for these numbers, they are not that big, some humans have tolerated doses that were much higher.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt#Implications_for_space_travelSlightly off-topic, but interesting and putting the radiation exposure into perspective:
Smokers (and by extension those in their surroundings exposed to secondhand smoke) are chronically exposed to much higher doses of radiation due to the radioactive Pb210 (a radioactive isotope of the heavy metal lead, half-life 22.2 years, β- decay) and Po210 (radioactive isotope of Polonium, half-life of 138.376 days, α decay) deposited in their lungs.
And when I say much higher doses, I mean it: easily in excess of 20 mSv per year, some smokers receive ten times as much, depending on the number of cigarettes smoked.
Those isotopes accumulate on tobacco leafs due to tiny hairs (trichomes) on the leafs and have lower boiling points than the temperature at which cigarettes burn. Upon inhaling them in their gaseous state they condense at the bronchial bifurcations and cannot be metabolised, so they stay there indefinitely until they decay (releasing high energy Helium nuclei and electrons), damaging the surrounding cells and genetic material, being a continual lung cancer risk.
For the smokers among you, think about that the next time you smoke in the presence of a child (or any person). You are carelessly depositing radioactive poison in their lungs that will slowly decay there forever (no limit to exposure time) and can randomly and gruesomely kill them at any point in time – now or in 40 years time (when you will be long dead but they might otherwise still have had 20 good years in them).
