Comments by "H. de Jong" (@h.dejong2531) on "Spacecraft on Wheels: NASA's LRV" video.

@metalicminer6231 No, it's not 'suicide', it was just more risky than a walk in the park. The people who did this were used to taking calculated risks: most astronauts were test pilots, and that community had fatalities every year. The LRV trips were all done within walking distance of the LM, i.e. if there was a catastrophic failure of the LRV they had enough time and oxygen to walk back.
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@MrBucidart Basic photography: when you take a photo, you first set the exposure time and the lens aperture, to get enough light to capture the scene without overexposing it. The Apollo photos show the brightly lit lunar surface, and they used an exposure time of 1/250 seconds. To take photos of the stars, you need an exposure time of several seconds. Every Apollo mission took hundreds of photos of Earth. Mostly from lunar orbit and during the Moon-Earth transit, but several missions took photos of Earth from the lunar surface as well.
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They didn't disappear. We measured them, and found that humans can pass through them safely. The radiation level in the van Allen belts is only problematic if you decide to place your spacecraft in the center of the belts: if you stay there for a week, the radiation dose becomes dangerous. The Apollo crews passed through the belts in 3 hours.
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False. The photos and video show an environment with 1/6 g gravity. This remains impossible to fake convincingly to this day. The Apollo crews took thousands of photos and hours of film, none of which has been proven fake. Lunar orbiters launched by India and China have photographed the Apollo landing sites on the moon. During the Apollo missions, the Soviets closely monitored them, and would have exposed any fakery.
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@huntergatherer7796 No. I've seen many claims of that, but every single one of those turns out to be false. Moon landing deniers have never come up with actual evidence, just bad claims. This ranges from plainly ridiculous nonsense (claiming that a photo shows a lighting gantry, when zooming in on the photo clearly shows nothing of the sort) to more subtle disinformation (e.g. using the 1958 initial estimates of the radiation level of the van Allen belts to claim that this region of space was too dangerous to fly through, when data gathered from 1959 to 1962 shows that those initial measurements were a factor 1000 too high).
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Yes, note the soil thrown up by the wheels. - notice that it all moves in ballistic arcs, instead of forming dust clouds, as it would in Earth's atmosphere - measure how the dust moves: it accelerates downward at 1.6 m/s2, instead of the 9.8 m/s2 we see on Earth.
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Wrong. There's nothing about the LRV that's impossible or not feasible with the technology of the time.
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That is nonsense. We have a ton of proof that the Apollo missions are real, and no evidence that says they were faked. All you have is bad arguments that fall apart on examination.
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In 1958, James van Allen and his team at the University of Iowa discovered the belts that were later named after him, using measurements from the NASA missions Explorer 1. With Explorer 3 and 4 and Pioneer 3 he measured the radiation intensity. By 1962, we had a good map of the van Allen belt, and this is what it told us: in the part of the belt where the intensity is highest, it is high enough that if you stay for about a week (inside an Apollo command module), you receive a lethal dose. So for the Apollo missions, the trajectory was designed to minimize the amount of time spent there. The Apollo astronauts flew through the belts in about 3 hours, while avoiding the part with the highest levels entirely. The hull thickness of the CSM was more than enough to reduce the radiation level inside to manageable levels. Astronauts' overall exposure was actually dominated by solar particles once outside Earth's magnetic field. The total radiation received by the astronauts varied from mission-to-mission but was measured to be between 0.16 and 1.14 rads (1.6 and 11.4 mGy).
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Every single argument they make has been debunked. It's a collection of 'I don't know how they did it, so instead of figuring that out I'm going to call it fake', mixed with cherrypicking data (use the 1958 measurements of the van Allen belts that were proven 1000 times too high by missions carried out in 1959-1962) and plain old lies.
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@DouglasUrantia They carried enough oxygen to walk more than 5 miles. This proves that it did happen.
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What you got was probably one of the training vehicles. These looked like the LRV but were built for use on Earth.
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@DonnyBrisco These are the facts: 1. moonlight is no different from sunlight. The moon reflects light from the sun. 2. at night, everything cools off by radiating heat away. When you block that radiation, the object cools down more slowly than its surroundings. This is why an object in the shade is warmer than an object that has not been shaded. I can prove that the temperature difference you see is not caused by moonlight: you can do this experiment at a time when the moon is not visible. Use a flashlight to illuminate a wall, and place an object to shade part of that wall. You will again see that the shaded part of the wall is warmer than the non-shaded surroundings.
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There have been vehicles with an electric motor in each wheel going back to the Lohner–Porsche in 1900.
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Apollo was unsustainably expensive. It consumed 5% of the US Federal budget. Since 1972, NASA's budget has never been above 1% of the Federal budget, so they had to choose a less expensive target: a permanently-manned station in Earth orbit (the ISS). Once the Space Shuttle was retired, some budget became available, which is being used to return to the Moon (Artemis). Because Artemis is being funded at a much lower level than Apollo, it's taking longer.
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Actual history made by NASA, one of the best engineering firms in the world.
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@SurfingFLA The LM was tested in Earth orbit (Apollo 5, unmanned, then Apollo 9, a manned flight) and in lunar orbit (Apollo 10). On Apollo 10, there was a brief loss of control after the descent module was jetissoned. However, unlike an aeroplane on Earth, where aerodynamic forces can make recovery difficult, recovering a spin in the LM was a matter of applying thrust in the opposite direction.
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@SurfingFLA There's nothing 'hard to believe' about the LM's ascent from the lunar surface. This was well within our capabilities by the late 1960s, using well-understood science and technology.
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@rfisher79 For missions to the moon, we don't need any tech. The hull of the spacecraft gives more than enough protection to safely pass through the van Allen belts.
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@SurfingFLA Yes, those tests were the equivalent to landing on and taking off from the moon. Every system on the LM was tested, performance of all engines was checked (i.e. measured that the engines would have sufficient performance to land on the moon and take off again).
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Why? Why would you have to mention such tangentia in a 10-minute documentary on a single aspect of the space program? That's what Wikipedia is for.
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The LRVs have been sitting on the lunar surface, being heated during the lunar day and cooling down during the lunar night. These thermal cycles have caused the components of the rover (especially the electronics) to expand and contract at different rates. It's unlikely the electronics will work.
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@flashgordon6670 There is nothing "plausible" about your claim that the Apollo missions were unmanned. There is a huge amount of evidence that shows the Apollo missions are real. You, on the other hand, have 0 evidence that shows these missions were faked. Among the evidence for the Apollo missions, we have hours of video that shows the astronauts working in an environment with 1/6g gravity and no atmosphere. This was impossible to fake on Earth in the 1960s, and even today, movies that are set on the moon cannot show this convincingly.
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@yomommaahotoo264 Every claim made by them has been debunked. They offer no evidence.
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Almost correct. At the time Apollo was cancelled, hardware for Apollo 18-20 had already been built. One Saturn V was repurposed for Skylab, the other two are on display in museums.
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@DonnyBrisco It doesn't matter who answers you. It matters that you get an answer. To summarize, you are the one who has been conned, by someone who claims to measure the temperature of moonlight while he's measuring something else.
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Nope. Looks like actual people on the moon, in 1/6g gravity, which remains impossible to fake convincingly here on Earth.
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@thebruffy1077 The astronauts were in pressurized spacesuits. It took a lot of effort to move in those suits. So the astronauts experimented with walking techniques, and found that the 'bunny hop' was the most energy-efficient. And this applied to the entire EVA: they tried to expend as little energy as possible. This definitely includes driving in the LRV. The LRV controls were built to facilitate this: they could drive and steer the LRV by moving just the wrist. When I'm driving, I sit still too, moving only as much as needed to operate the controls.
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@flashgordon6670 As you've been told already, we don't have telescopes on Earth large enough to resolve the landing sites. Spacecraft orbiting the Moon have photographed the landing sites.
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Both the Russians and Americans had lots of failures early on in their lunar program. The Americans lost 5 Ranger spacecraft, 2 Surveyor, 6 Pioneer. By the early 1970s, the Russians made several successful landings on the moon, including 2 rovers (Lunokhod) and a sample return mission.
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@Sneakycat1971 Anyone with common sense and a grasp of the basics of physics and the scientific method, knows that every single argument produced by the moon landing deniers is a sham. Those arguments are based on ignorance ("I don't know how they did it, so I'm going to claim it's fake"), or outright lies (deniers have been caught fabricating evidence). Of the thousands of photos, hours of video and other evidence of the moon landings, exactly 0 has been proven wrong.
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The intent of the Space Shuttle was to make access to space cheaper. That turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated, and the US government was unwilling to fund all of the R&D needed to achieve that (which is why the Shuttle used e.g. solid boosters that were very expensive to service, instead of an airplane-like first stage that would have returned to the launch site and landed on a runway).
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@typhoidmary5097 "everything humans touch they destroy" is disproven by any number of magnificent feats of engineering that stand to this day. NASA conducted Apollo in the open: they published everything. Journalists had access to the people designing and building the Apollo hardware. Every photo taken on the moon was published. They had live video from the moon. In addition, NASA's claims have been confirmed by independent third parties. Scientists from all over the world were able to receive radio signals form the Apollo craft during the missions. Amateur astronomers saw the spacecraft on their way to the moon. The USSR (which was running its own lunar program at the time, trying to beat the Americans) would have loved to be able to prove the Apollo landings were faked. They had spies in the US aerospace industry. Yet they accepted the Apollo landings as real. Since then, lunar orbiters from several countries have photographed the Apollo landing sites.
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@yomommaahotoo264 Every single argument made by the Apollo Detectives has been debunked. They have provided no evidence that stands up to examination.
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@Roadglide911 1x Apollo Guidance Computer, 1x Abort Guidance System.
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yes, that's correct.
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@RRaquello The success of the Saturn was down to the fact that NASA could afford to build huge test stands where they could test-fire every stage of the Saturn V. The Russians didn't do this, and resorted to testing their stages by flying them instead. Those failures were not unexpected (they thought they'd need up to 14 launches to get the bugs out of the rocket).
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@RRaquello The Russians thought that building a test stand capable of holding down 4500 tons of thrust would take too long. They didn't take the moon race seriously until 1965, so they were far behind schedule. The engines used for the first 4 launches were not restartable at all: they used pyrotechnics to open and close the valves. So they couldn't even be tested before installation. They'd build 6 engines, test 3 and if those passed, the other 3 were installed in a stage. They were working on a version of the engine that could be restarted, which would have solved that problem, but those didn't become available until the early 1970s.
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What you're measuring is not the "temperature of moonlight". The object you used to produce shade is blocking the heat radiating from the shaded object.
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Apollo 14 used the Modular Equipment Transporter, a two-wheeled cart (a bit like a wheelbarrow) that was pushed by the astronauts.
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@jeffreypardy2831 That dream does not mean Apollo 14 had an LRV.
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The footage of the astronauts driving was taken as part of a test of the LRV: this was specifically done to see what the limits of the LRV were.
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@BA-gn3qb This is easily verifiable: take any of the lunar videos, and measure how long it takes for an object to fall. You will find that all objects take 2.45 times longer to reach the ground than they would on Earth.
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