125 Billion Market Targeted as Space Inc, an industry where the goals are infinite! Thus,Manned flight, next on ISRO's list, Meant Expansion of India Incs and Manusmriti Hegemony in the SACE Replicating NASA PENTAGON and US Weapon Economy!
UN names Mukesh Ambani to key group on development goals
Mandela's birthday celebrated with good deeds
Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams, Chapter 513
Palash Biswas
http://indianholocaustmyfatherslifeandtime.blogspot.com/
125 Billion Market Targeted as Space Inc, an industry where the goals are infinite!
UN names Mukesh Ambani to key group on development goals!
http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/scripts/pressrelease.aspx
Ignited by their maiden success in placing a tiny satellite in the polar orbit early this week, its young pioneers are raring to launch two more satellites into space.Thus,Manned flight, next on ISRO's list, Meant Expansion of India Incs and Manusmriti Hegemony in the SACE Replicating NASA PENTAGON and US Weapon Economy!
Understanding this business aspect, India too launched a marketing arm of ISRO, Antrix in 1992. The motive behind such an entity in a state-managed space research organisation was clear: promotion and commercial exploitation of space products, services and transfer of technologies developed by ISRO. "It was a logical step," says KR Sridhara Murthi, managing director of Antrix.
According to Mr Murthi, commercialisation is one of the dimensions of space activities which developed over the past two decades, particularly in Europe and the US. "Such activity assumed great significance because space applications would service several vertical commercial application connected to broadcasting, communication essentially providing the connectivity, and then also generating information from space which will be useful for resource management and environment studies," says Mr Murthi. Initially, ISRO entered an alliance with EUSAT corporation to sell its remote sensing data. EUSAT had a network of groundstations and customers world wide. But once gaining entry to this institutionalised market, ISRO diversified its approach to different regions.
"Today we have customers for such data in Americas, Europe, Middle East, Russia, China and Australia. We also bid to sell our data at global forums," says Mr Murthi.
Also, today, the data sale is merely 8% of ISRO's revenue. The big money remains in the area of launch services and leasing out of transponders. Since 1999 when Antrix first launched a third party satellite along with ISRO's own to earn a few dollars more—by sending 110 kg South Korean Kistsat-3 and 45 kg DLR-Tubsat of Germany—it has launched over 22 small and big foreign satellites, the heaviest one so far being 350-kg Italian satellite Agile in 2007.
And officials say ISRO has been able to command international level of prices. "Often it comes in the range of $15000 to $30,000 per kg, and with the PSLV which has a capacity of carrying over 1,000 kg payload to put into orbit, you can imagine the amount involved," says Mr Murthi. Antrix's annual revenues have been in the range of Rs 1,000 crore.
According to ISRO head, their synergies with public and private industry is significant. "Over the years of our existence, we have had direct links with over 500 industrial bodies. These include public sector undertakings, large business houses, small and medium firms as well as micro entrepreneurs," says Dr Radhakrishnan.
Amit Prasad, CEO of SatNav, which creates IT products in the GIS and GPS space, says ISRO took the lead when it came to making satellite imagery that is useful to customers, available at a time when there was no clarity on whether private companies were allowed to map digitally. "The imagery, sourced from ISRO was sold by the National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad. In comparison, to the international imagery which was available at $14 per sq km, ISRO provided imagery at a much cheaper cost, such that images of an entire city were available at a few lakhs," says Prasad.
Why India's smallest satellite is such a big deal
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/why-i ... l/646742/0
..Vigneswaran, who was responsible for Studsat's on-board computing, stayed on at NMIT for a year after he graduated in electronics and communications, and so did eight others who were in charge of various sub-systems such as structure, payload and communication. "I had an offer from IBM but this project was important, it was exciting. I am leaving in August for higher studies in the Netherlands," he says. His twin brother Visweswaran led the ground station development before leaving about a month ago for France, where he is studying at the International Space University.
"Most of us had offers from good companies and universities, but nothing would provided the kind of exposure and hands-on experience in space technology that this project has given us," says Chetan Dikshit, who managed the finance side of the project and will go on to do an MBA this year.
The pico-satellite tested the limits of their knowledge and skill. "Since it is so small, it has no thrusters to orient the camera. To turn the camera to face the earth, we have to perform algorithms that could take days," says Vigneswaran.
Chetan Angadi, one of the key technical leaders, says the optics were bought from the market but integration had to be meticulous since a minute difference could result in blurred images. "We expect the first images, which will have a resolution of 93 metres per pixel, to arrive after the satellite stabilises," he says. Sharath, who designed the outer structure of Studsat, says the challenge was to maintain an accuracy of 0.01 mm — "A sheet of paper is 0.03 mm thick" — in dimensions.
....
Mamatha, a student of electronics and communication who led the attitude determination sub-system of Studsat, and is in charge of the tracking station, says, "We have the requisite equipment now. All we need to do is pass on the passion for space science to our juniors and continue making Studsats."
An unmanned test crew module will be put into orbit by ISRO in 2013 as a prelude to the country's maiden manned mission to send two Indians into space. ISRO also said on Monday that a third launch pad, at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore, is proposed to be built at Sriharikota, where the rocket that will take the Indian astronauts into space, will be assembled and blasted off. ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan said the space agency plans to launch the first test unmanned mission with an unmanned capsule on PSLV, which will be put into orbit and recovered soon after the mission.
Talking to reporters here after the successful launch of remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2B and four other satellites by the PSLV rocket, he said that in the next three months ISRO will launch GSLV-F06, which will carry a communication satellite, and PSLV-C16 with a remote sensing satellite on board.
ISRO has prepared a road map with an initial plan to put two humans in orbit around earth, keep them there for seven days and bring them back safely, Mr Radhakrishnan said.
Mr Radhakrishnan said all new elements for the unmanned launch have been designed. "We have gone to system concept reviews. The first level of definitions and specifications have been drawn up," he said. "We need to have the orbital vehicle, namely the capsule and its design and then develop the environmental control and life support system, which will be followed by crew escape system that will be very vital in case of mission abort," he said. These modules will be evaluated by launch of PSLV unmanned mission, he said, adding it would give them confidence, help evaluate the total system for its survival in the space environment on how the entire system behaves. To a question on whether ISRO had set a timeframe for the manned mission, he said, "I don't want to commit the date unless we start the programme".
Mr Radhakrishnan said scientists will work on the crew model, which will have an environmental control life support system. "We are also working out a very high reliability vehicle, capable of putting crew module with adequate number of persons," he said.
Mr Dattan, director of SDSC said a proposal has been given to the government for approval to set up a third launch pad at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore. "Preliminary design of the third launch pad is now going on with various experts. Location of the launch pad has also been finalised taking into account the safety measures," he said. "
Once approval is obtained, the third launch pad and other infrastructure activities for the manned moon mission will come up," he added.
"We also propose to set up one more vertical assembly building, similar to what we have now. This will be capable of assembling the existing and forthcoming advance vehicles," he said.
Mr Dattan said the programme has already been initiated and will start once government accords approval.
"The successful launch and placing of our first pico-satellite (StudSat) in the earth's lower orbit has inspired us to build two similar satellites for the next launch," the project's core member G. Kartik told IANS here.
Riding piggy back on India's advanced remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2B and three other satellites, the 850-gm cubical StudSat was launched onboard the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C15) Monday by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) from its spaceport Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, about 80 km northeast of Chennai.
"We were thrilled to see the 44-metre tall rocket soaring into a clear sky with our first experimental satellite as the smallest payload and were excited when we learnt that it was successfully placed in the designated polar sun synchronous orbit 630 km away from the earth, 22 minutes after a perfect lift-off," Kartik recalled.
Kartik, who graduated in B.E. (mechanical) this year from Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology (NMIT) in this tech hub, is part of the 14-member core team, which designed and built the satellite with a CMOS camera in it and four small solar panels mounted on it to generate energy for orbiting over the next 12 months.
The complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) is a chip that holds data without external power source.
"Our joy knew no bounds when we received the first signal from StudSat at 11.02 a.m., about 70 minutes after the launch, at the ground station we have set up in the institute campus. Since then, we are getting the beacon signal all the time to indicate that the satellite's health parameters are normal," project leader Chetan Angadi said.
The country's first pico-satellite project team was formed in January 2009 as a consortium with about 40 under-graduates from four engineering colleges from Karnataka and three from Andhra Pradesh under the aegis of the state-run Indian space agency.
"The objective of the project was to educate college students about space technology and encourage them to build mini satellites with the required infrastructure, including a communication link and a ground station to capture the images of the earth with a 90-metre resolution and receive the telemetry data," Kartik said.
Though StudSat is orbiting over the earth's twin polar regions (north and south) and crosses Bangalore four-five times a day, emitting the signal at a frequency of 437.05 megahertz (MHz), it is yet to stabilise in the sun synchronous orbit to switch on its camera.
"When the camera is switched on after the satellite's solar panels are fully charged by next week, it will perform remote sensing and capture images of the surface of the earth with the 90-metre resolution, which will be the best achieved by any pico-satellite in the world," said Angadi, a B.E. graduate in electronics.
The images will be able to determine the conditions of the landmass, its vegetation, moisture content or dryness in the soil for agriculture and other farming activity.
As the country's smallest operational satellite, StudSat gave the students hands-on experience in space technology and to design, fabricate and build it under the supervision of ISRO project director for small satellites D.V.A. Raghava Murthy.
"The satellite was built at a cost of Rs.55 lakh and the support infrastructure to track and monitor it at Rs.60 lakh. Our institute (NMIT) funded the entire project cost," Angadi said.
Going forward, many of the members associated with the project have decided to continue with the institute to build the next two satellites that will have two-three additional instruments for astronomical, atmospheric and terrestrial studies, including terrain mapping.
"We will begin work on the next project after StudSat becomes fully operational and stabilises in its functions. Though designed with a six-month life span, we are hoping it will last at least a year," Kartik added.
Economic times reports:
The relationship between ISRO and the private sector goes back a long way. Private firms have been supplying satellite components and ground equipment to ISRO since the initial stages of its developing satellite launch vehicle in the early 1970s.
Firms such as Larsen & Toubro and Godrej have been associated with the space agency for a number of years. "Our involvement with ISRO started in the 70s. At that time Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was overlooking the operations himself," says MV Kotwal, senior vice president (heavy engineering) at L&T. The company has worked on all the generations of satellite launch vehicles—SLV, ASLV, PSLV and GSLV. Today, L&T makes rocket casings, has a facility to manufacture advanced composites, makes honeycomb deck panels and is installing a special radar system at Sriharikota which has a 4,000-km tracking range.
Private players value their experience in dealing with a professional group like ISRO. According to most firms, although ISRO is a government body, it never followed a sarkari approach in their interface with the private sector. "When their programmes started to mature in the mid-80s, they wanted to work with the private sector," recalls SM Vaidya, vice president and business head, Godrej precision systems at Godrej & Boyce who has worked with the company for over 20 years and was there when the company first started work for ISRO in 1985. Godrej began with components for satellites and then graduated to the subsystem level. Now they make critical liquid propulsion engines for launch vehicles as well as parts of the engines fitted directly to the satellite.
ISRO's model is unique. Unlike others, they reach out and find companies with specialised capabilities and then commission work to them instead of the companies approaching them for orders. "Stringent measures are used to ensure high level of quality that is the benchmark of space projects worldwide," says ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan. The contracts too are different from regular government handouts. Mr Vaidya says ISRO will approach other suppliers only when they are unable to supply a particular component. "Till then we are the primary supplier," he says.
In recent times, ISRO's outsourcing of work has increased. "There has been a several fold growth in outsourcing. The value of outsourcing too has increased and more critical work is being given out," says PS Veeraraghavan, director of Vikram Sarabahi Space Centre (VSSC), who himself is a rocket technologist. The R&D work happens in-house at ISRO where they define processes and then pass it on to the industry. It is the organisations policy to use the maximum infrastructure available in the country, says PP Sinha, deputy director at VSSC. In all, about 200-300 private companies supply products and services to ISRO. There are a few small companies who work exclusively for ISRO. "The additional work they are now getting is because they have worked with ISRO and follow stringent quality," says Mr Sinha.
With private companies maturing, they are getting more critical work from ISRO. Take for example Astra Microwave which makes critical hardware components that were outsourced by ISRO for the first time. "We created a fresh facility, trained people and got a quality check done by ISRO before getting the contract," says Astra MD, B Malla Reddy. The Rs 110-crore company has been working with ISRO since 2002 and today about 20% of its business comes from the organisation. Aerospace firms such as Taneja Aerospace and Aviation also work closely with ISRO. "They are among our top customers," says CEO (aerostructures), SM Kapoor.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/ISRO-and-the-private-sector-In-reliable-company/articleshow/6182375.cms
South Africans are celebrating Nelson Mandela's birthday by planting gardens, painting clinics and calling for unity.
Mandela, who turned 92 years old on Sunday, was spending the day with his family in Johannesburg. His wife went to an orphanage in Soweto to help plant a vegetable garden.
Mandela's wife Graca Machel says Sunday is a day for people to say, ``I can extend my goodness to other people.''
Mandela Day, inaugurated last year and falling on the anti-apartheid icon's July 18 birthday, was conceived as an international day devoted to public service.
National police commissioner Nathi Mthethwa says that spirit drew him to a Pretoria township where anti-foreigner violence broke out two years ago. He urged the community to be peaceful and unified.
Reliance Industries chief Mukesh Ambani has been named by the United Nations to a key advocacy group on Millennium Development Goals, whose mandate includes finding ways to fight socio-economic evils such as poverty.
Ambani is the only Indian to be a part of the MDG Advocacy Group that comprises eminent international personalities including Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, philanthropist Ted Turner and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, among others.
Ambani is expected to focus on a global partnership for development, that will include development of an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system.
UN said the top Indian industrialist will also look at the special needs of the least developed countries (LDC), as well as landlocked developing countries and small island developing states.
The MDGs are eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 global organisations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015.
These include reducing extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS and developing a global partnership for development.
The MDG Advocacy Group will support the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in building political will and mobilising global action, says the world body.
One of the first tasks of the Advocacy Group is the preparatory process for the MDG Summit in September this year. The MDG Summit is being seen as a turning point in the collective effort to achieve the goals by the 2015 target date.
Ambani's appointment to the advocacy group comes at a time when the 2010 Millennium Development Goals report card paints a dark picture for South Asia, including India.
Ambani is a member of the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry, government of India, and the Board of Governors of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi.
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He is also the vice-chairman of The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), a CEO-led, global association of some 200 companies dealing exclusively with business and sustainable development.
Apart from being a member of the Indo-US CEOs Forum, Mukesh Ambani is also on the International Advisory Board of Citigroup, the National Board of Kuwait and the McKinsey Knowledge Advisory Council.
India Space Inc, a $125 bn industry
18 Jul 2010, 0640 hrs IST,Pankaj Molekhi,ET Bureau- Business Partnership
- Indian Space Research Organisation
- National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad
- EUSAT
*
→ Foreign connection: ISRO sends payloads for foreign space agencies |
According to Mr Murthi, commercialisation is one of the dimensions of space activities which developed over the past two decades, particularly in Europe and the US. "Such activity assumed great significance because space applications would service several vertical commercial application connected to broadcasting, communication essentially providing the connectivity, and then also generating information from space which will be useful for resource management and environment studies," says Mr Murthi. Initially, ISRO entered an alliance with EUSAT corporation to sell its remote sensing data. EUSAT had a network of groundstations and customers world wide. But once gaining entry to this institutionalised market, ISRO diversified its approach to different regions.
"Today we have customers for such data in Americas, Europe, Middle East, Russia, China and Australia. We also bid to sell our data at global forums," says Mr Murthi.
Also, today, the data sale is merely 8% of ISRO's revenue. The big money remains in the area of launch services and leasing out of transponders. Since 1999 when Antrix first launched a third party satellite along with ISRO's own to earn a few dollars more—by sending 110 kg South Korean Kistsat-3 and 45 kg DLR-Tubsat of Germany—it has launched over 22 small and big foreign satellites, the heaviest one so far being 350-kg Italian satellite Agile in 2007.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/India-Space-Inc-a-125-bn-industry/articleshow/6182108.cms
Foreign connection: ISRO sends payloads for foreign space agencies
18 Jul 2010, 0219 hrs IST,Pankaj Molekhi,ET BureauFor every one kilogram of third party payload that ISRO launches into orbit, the space agency earns an approximate $20,000. Last week too when its polar satellite launch vehicle an Algerian satellite into space orbit, it fetched a neat $4 million, besides more than half a dozen fresh orders. But then, there has never been any dearth of orders. The ISRO's pipeline is already choked with orders worth Rs 3,000 crore. "In case of space activity, execution of an order depends on a number of issues, from time schedule and skilled manpower," says ISRO's marketing arm's head K Sridhara Murthi. "The launch services also involve provision of available spare capacity in our vehicles."
The PSLV, often referred to as ISRO's workhorse, is the most attractive launch vehicle for the global market because it has the capability to launch multiple satellites. Improved features over the years have not only increased the payload capacity but also acquired an ability to launch different size of satellites into various types of orbits. This flexibility with respect to various payloads and the regular turnaround for annual launch has worked to the agency's benefit. "We are able to compete with any vehicle in the world in PSLV category," says Mr Murthi. "But our own vehicles are the priority. Whatever capacity is available after meeting the requirements of our payloads, we offer it to global bodies. Of late, we are getting proposals for dedicated launches from other agencies."
| ndia asks US for help in manned space programme |
| Ajai Shukla / Florida May 15, 2010, 0:52 IST |
Here at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the ongoing countdown to the 132nd space shuttle launch is also counting towards the end of this iconic space programme. Washington has decreed that the Atlanta, which is scheduled to blast off on Friday, will be the third last shuttle mission ever. With a follow-on programme nowhere in sight, America's space shuttle pioneers stare at an uncertain future.
President Barack Obama has decided that it is wasteful and risky to continue using the space shuttle for transporting US astronauts and stores to and from the International Space Station (ISS); instead, this low-tech, "near-earth" task should be farmed out to commercial agencies. The cutting-edge capabilities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be directed towards new frontiers in outer space. But there is no new space policy that spells out an alternative task.
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But, for the longer term, the US is eyeing a closer linkage with the Indian space programme, something that New Delhi has already suggested to Washington. In February, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chief K Radhakrishnan and K R Sridhara Murthi, MD of Isro's marketing arm, Antrix, met senior Boeing executives and suggested closer ties. Boeing is the OEM of the space shuttle. Senior Indian leaders and diplomats, including Ambassador to the US, Meera Shankar, have persistently pressed for closer US-India space cooperation.
Now, senior executives from Boeing Defence, Space and Security (BDS) have divulged the details of cooperation that Isro has sought for building up India's capacity for manned space missions. Kevin Hoshstrasser, the head of Boeing's operations at the Kennedy Space Centre in Orlando, Florida, reveals that Isro has sought assistance in four specific areas:
- A launch escape system (LES) to enable astronauts to escape from a rocket that is undergoing catastrophic failure. Last week, Boeing successfully tested their latest escape vehicle.
- A life support and environmental control system, which creates an environment inside the space capsule in which astronauts can comfortably carry out their functions. This removes carbon dioxide and maintains humidity levels.
- Vehicle Health Monitoring System (VHMS), which keeps a constant check over key systems.
- Reusable space systems and composition cryogenic tanks. These tanks would be used to store fuel for India's cryogenic motors.
Senior Boeing executives are in contact with Isro and Boeing has prepared an internal white paper on US-India space cooperation. For discussing substantive, and potentially classified, issues with Isro, Boeing has applied to the US government for a Technical Assistance Agreement.
Boeing's Business Development Senior Manager for space systems, Sam Gunderson, is emphatic that Boeing wishes to partner Isro and in building Indian space systems. Brushing away concerns about US export licencing, Gunderson says, "Dual use restrictions (under the US law: International Traffic in Arms Regulations) in space cooperation would be significant, but we can find a way to work around those."
Space partnership has gained momentum since the US-India nuclear pact. In 2009, Isro invited Boeing to a conference in India on robotics. The moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, carried NASA sensors made by Boeing.
As the countdown continues at the Kennedy Space Centre, the excitement that suffuses a shuttle launch is tinged with disappointment at the impending closure of the shuttle programme. Scientists explain that no rocket in the world can send up 7 astronauts to the ISS for extended missions, and also carry 25 tonnes of bulky cargo. The space shuttle is made even more invaluable by its ability to bring back tonnes of cargo to earth from the space station, material that would otherwise be wasted.
(The writer is in Florida at Boeing's invitation)
India-US Space Ties Take Off With PSLV
 illustration only |
Mumbai, India (PTI) Jul 14, 2010
Almost a year ago on July 20, 2009, external affairs minister SM Krishna and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton met at Hyderabad House in New Delhi and signed what is known as Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) which strengthens Indo-US space ties.
On Monday, this pact became a reality when PSLV for the first time placed in orbit a satellite with a large number of US components. According to Isro officials, this flight is therefore politically important with regards to Indo-US relationship.
The satellite is nearly 200-kg Alsat (Algerian Satellite), owned by Algerian Space Agency and is built by a French company with several US-made parts. Isro officials said the Alsat launch was significant because it was the first one following the signing of the TSA between India and the US.
TSA facilitates the launch of US satellites and satellites with US components on Indian launch vehicles. It will cover launches involving satellites owned by US government or academic institutions or by third country space agencies and universities which have US equipment on board.
Soon after the historic Indo-US deal was clinched, executive director of Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of Isro, K R Sridhara Murthy was quoted as saying that the agreement "will open up more satellite launch operations for India. Earlier, satellites built with US-manufactured components were not available for Indian launch vehicles,'' he said.
Officials said the launch of Alsat by India on Monday will inaugurate a new chapter in the country's space programme because it will finally open the way for the country to fly either American spacecraft or spacecraft having US parts.
According to them there were earlier instances when foreign countries were keen on launching their satellites from India primarily because of the low costs. But, American restrictions prevented them from doing so. "With Alsat the scene is now all set to change and India's market share of launching satellites will increase,'' an official told this newspaper.
India in space: No dream is too big for us
18 Jul 2010, 0247 hrs IST,Pallava Bagla,With the sixteenth consecutively successful launch of India's smaller rocket, the country's space programme is poised to take a huge leap, by soon launching Indian astronauts in space on an Indian rocket launched from Indian soil, so it seems no dream is too big for India in space.
Space fairing is a risky business and certainly not meant for the faint hearted only nations and companies that have deep pockets and an abiding interests can hope to harness the full potential of the immense opportunities that space has opened up. India is among six countries that has end to end in-house capabilities in fabricating satellites and launching them into space. Within the next one year ISRO is now planning 5 rocket launches to with as many big Indian satellites.
India's is a national space programme with the tax payer supporting the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) with over a US$ 1 billion annually, still the promise and potential is huge and the government needs to continue supporting this effort till such time as the Indian industry is mature enough to take on some of the tasks like those associated with assembly line type of commercial launches.
The budgets with which the ISRO works is almost 17 times lower than that of the American space agency, but India's achievements are no less, surprisingly it was left to India's maiden mission to the moon Chandrayaan-1 to bring back clinching evidence that the moon is not parched, scores of human landings since 1969 were not able to unravel this mystery. No trifling achievement for an institution like ISRO that is still listed on the technology denial regime of western nations.
With 10 remote sensing satellites in space, India's is the largest constellation of civilian eyes in the sky in the world, this comes with capabilities to map every car parked on any street anywhere in the world thanks to the three sub-meter resolution capability mapping satellites of the CARTOSAT series. The day and night viewing ability even in cloudy skies presented by the Radar imaging satellite lets the country keep an eye on its hostile neighbours like never before.
India's space programme was and is still meant largely for Earth observation, so remote sensing and using space capabilities to harness them for use of the 'aam aadmi' occupy much of ISRO's efforts, finding water in far off places; helping fisherman locate schools of fish in open oceans are just some of the flagship efforts. Making available high resolution images obviously at a price for infrastructure developments like roads, telecom networks and weather forecasting are a big money spinner for ISRO and the appetite for these will only grow.
With a constellation of 11 communications satellites, the largest such in Asia-Pacific. The huge boom which the country has seen in television coverage may not have been possible but for the country's very own INSAT's that come with cheap transponders. The highly networked banking infrastructure; automatic teller machines (ATMs) and the many share trading terminals all depend on secure and reliable connectivity through satellites The sectors that will depend more and more on space technology are only likely to increase, with sun rise industries being the ones which will make use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) based approaches to navigation solutions.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6182377.cms
Indian space history crosses three decades of success
62rate or flag this page
By Matrixkavi
The space-story of our nation started with the launching of a US-made Nike Apache rocket from Thumba in Thiruvananthapuram district of Kerala, India. This was a two stage propeller rocket which weighed 715kg and utillised the first stage solid propellants to reach an altitude of 208km and then released the sodium vapours. The whole event took place on november 21, 1963.
But the milestone in the Indian Space History was the lauch of a "pencil" rocket which took place six years later, from Thumba again on February 22,1969. This one was a comparitively smaller rocket which weighed about only 10kg and used 350gm of solid fuel.
Following this one was the first of the SVL-3 launchings ( which failed) on August 10,1979 at SHAR. But at July 18,1980, SVL-3 made its successful flight carrying our satellite Rohini, which was put into the orbit on 8.11 am IST. Twenty other successful lauches followed this single failure, each one India's space missions more and more successful. The last among the lot was that launched from Sriharikota.
On july 18 2005, India celebrated the silver jubilee of the country's first successful flight of SVL-3. And did you know who the project leader for the same was? It was none other than our Ex- President Mr. A P J Abdul Kalam!
http://hubpages.com/hub/indian_space_history_decades
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Sunday, June 13, 2010
Indian Space Program Relies On Commercial Cooperation
Aviation Week & Space Technology Jun 14 , 2010 , p. 70
Neelam Mathews
Hyderabad, India
Frank Morring, Jr.
Hyderabad, India
Cooperation in space is commercial as well as international for India
Printed headline: Open For Business
In India, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) can be a lucrative associate for large, medium and small enterprises, as more than 500 companies now contribute to the Indian civil space program.
As India's space program grows, more business—currently not in high volumes—is expected as exports rise. ISRO's budget for outsourcing work to industry exceeds $1 billion this year.
As it creates an Indian supply chain using public-private partnerships, opportunity grows with the rise in international space cooperation, as with its Chandrayaan series of lunar probes.
U.S. scientists join Indian colleagues in preparing the M3 (Moon Mineralogy Mapper) instrument for Chandrayaan-1. It later found evidence for lunar water.Credit: INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANIZATION
"It is a model of development that offers a sustained order book for tapping niche capability such as components, titanium forgings and small actuators," says Rahul Gangal, senior vice president of Religare Defense Advisory Services. "It's not about volume; it's about value and future infrastructure that will be ready for a fast-evolving space industry, he says.
The market is growing, as is the high-end manufacturing sector for small electronics and specialized metals. There is value added, and quality standards are high. ISRO has been instrumental in developing industrial capabilities to deal with specialized metals and alloys that will give a boost to the industry, adds Gangal.
ISRO is dependent on its suppliers, as its facilities are primarily involved in integration and assembly, according to S.M Kapoor, CEO (Aerostructures), Taneja Aerospace and Aviation (TAAL), which has absorbed new technology to provide structural stages for the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle.
Kapoor is quick to add that while the business is not large, it is continuous for a medium-sized business like his.
When ISRO set up an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) in 2008, which included the $20-million 32-meter (105-ft.) antenna to track the lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 and future planetary forays (see p. 62), the prime business was contracted to government-owned Electronics Corp. of India Ltd., a leading supplier of ISDN network termination solutions. The software was supplied by Bhabha Atomic Center. About 70% of the work on the project was handled by the private industrial giant, Larsen & Toubro, which fabricated the structure, and by Godrej Aerospace, which provided the "periscope" waveguide.
However, the space industry in India is still young. Often, software is developed and designed by ISRO. "We use the industry for lower-end work like coding and testing under supervision," says one ISRO official. "It is difficult to check bugs as it requires experience and knowledge."
"Risat (radar-imaging satellite) development used industry because of transmitters involved," says Kiran Kumar, associate director of the Space Applications Center in Ahmadabad. "They were built and integrated there."
Risat has a C-band (5.35-GHz.) synthetic aperture radar with a spatial resolution of 1.5 meters.
Kumar acknowledges the industry is capable of doing much more with a higher level of capability. "Being a government entity, there are procedural problems to get work done within timelines," he says. "Today the industry can go faster, as they are focused. However, it will take a certain amount of time for them to [be aware of] quality. This is something we will have to guard against."
Private Wipro Infotech, having worked on programs for Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd., expects to provide software engineering services for Chandrayaan-2 . "This is a new area for us," says spokesman Shiva Kumar Hossamani.
The company will soon delve into aerospace manufacturing, including activators for launch products. It is also looking at collaborating on robot design and India'srover to land on the Moon.
Original equipment manufacturers "view India as a low-cost country but it is not, as manufacturing has to follow processes, and equipment is expensive," says Hossamani. "The difference is people that add value through multi-skilling. Our policy is to source critical parts in-house and outsource non-critical ones."
ISRO's commercial cooperation isn't necessarily limited to Indian companies. Recently, Boeing Defense, Space and Security officials spoke of cooperation areas for building India's capacity for manned space missions, echoing Meera Shankars, India's ambassador to the U.S., on the importance of human space exploration. India has indicated it would like to partner with NASA on the International Space Station.
One possible area of cooperation between Boeing and ISRO may be the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) contract awarded by NASA to Boeing to initiate design and development architecture of a commercial crew transport to and from the ISS (AW&ST Feb. 8, p. 23).
Possible Indian contributions include the Launch Escape System (LES), development of an LES vehicle health-monitoring system and abort triggers, life-support system components, and crew accommodation hardware. "Small components is what we would like to do. This would mean technical collaboration," said Roger Krone, president of Boeing Network and Space Systems, during a visit to India in February.
"More countries can now participate in the ISS, which will be in orbit until 2020. A broader international use of that asset would be positive," says Krone.
To the Indian space industry, that would mean more business.
http://aerospacediary.blogspot.com/2010/06/indian-space-program-relies-on.html
| 7. Economic Aspects of India's Space Program | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prev | Chapter 10. India's Space Enterprise — A Case Study in Strategic Thinking and Planning | Next |
7. Economic Aspects of India's Space Program
By the early nineties, all the four major components of the space programe, namely, Satellite Communications, Meteorology, Earth Observations and Launch Vehicles had entered the operational stage.
The Satellite-based Communication Services (SATCOM) Policy of 1997 and the Remote Sensing based value added services envisaged opening of the space industry to the private sector. Therefore it was considered timely and appropriate to commission a study on the economic aspects of the Indian space program through the Madras School of Economics (Sankar 2006a; 2006b; Sankar et al. 2003).
7.1. Space Expenditures
Accumulated space expenditures since inception to the last fiscal year ending on March 31, 2006 amounted to US$ 7 billion. These expenditures category-wise are given in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4
As is obvious from the figure, 39 per cent investment is on launch vehicles, 36 per cent on Satellite communications and meteorology, 14 per cent on earth observations, 6 per cent on space sciences and the balance on other items. About three-fourth of the total expenditure was incurred towards development of technology in the case of launch vehicles, whereas in the case of satellite communications, meteorology and earth observations, three-fourth of the investment is for building operational systems based on service needs of the country.
The space expenditure of India as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) today stands at 0.09 per cent. Compared with the current annual government space budgets of US $2.5 billion for Japan, and US$1.5 billion for France, India's space budget is US$0.60 billion.
7.2. Methodology
For the purposes of economic analysis, it is useful to classify space activities into two stages, namely, (i) design, development, testing, manufacturing and launch of spacecrafts into desired orbital slots (construction stage), and (ii) applications of satellite services to different uses (exploitation stage). The output basket of the space program contains a mix of private goods, public goods, social goods and strategic/incommensurable goods. Research in space sciences, most meteorological services and information are public goods. Equity considerations are important in provision of certain goods e.g. access to public telephone, access to radio and TV. The social goals dominate in public sector radio and TV programs. Use of the space program as an instrument for guaranteeing strategic, political, scientific and economic leadership yields strategic and incommensurable benefits. The methodology adopted for the two stages, category-wise, is given in Fig. 5.
Fig. 5
7.3. Construction Stage
Regardless of the nature of goods / services provided and whether it is produced by a public firm or private firm, cost minimization is a valid criterion. The economic costing methodology requires (i) a rational basis for allocation of costs among the payloads of a multi-purpose satellite (ii) apportionment of common and joint costs amongst various ongoing programs of the organization / institution (iii) investment expenditure, their time pattern and cost of capital and (iv) output streams, their time pattern and discount rates for present value.
The global market for communication transponders is generally competitive with many private and public suppliers and many customers buying the transponders. Government induced market distortions are relatively less in this market. Hence, the international market prices can serve as a benchmark for assessing the cost effectiveness of INSAT transponders. A detailed study on economic costing of INSAT transponders with 10 per cent cost of capital on investments and 5.5 per cent discount factor on future returns has brought out the cost advantage of INSAT transponders by at least 25 per cent of the prevailing international prices. The cost performance of INSAT system has been considered to be commendable keeping in view the relatively high capital cost in India and the dependence on some foreign components in the production of the satellites.
A comparative analysis of remote sensing satellites and launch vehicles is rather difficult due to non-availability of reliable estimates of the costs of foreign systems and also due to differences in capabilities. However, preliminary estimates show that the costs of Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS-1D) is very much lower than the reported costs of similar LANDSAT and SPOT satellites. Similarly, the development cost of India's PSLV and GSLV is US $1.3 billion as compared to about US $ 4 billion for the European Ariane 1 to 4, though there are some capacity variations in these systems.
7.4. Exploitation Stage
For measurement of the benefits, the role of satellite technology is considered under three different categories: (a) where the technology is unique, (b) where the technology is a substitute to existing technologies, and (c) where the technology is complementary to existing technologies. In the second case, one can measure cost savings due to satellite technology compared with the existing technology. If the technology is superior to the existing one, one has to estimate the incremental value of the improvement. Where the space technology is used in conjunction with many other technologies, one has to rely on a cost allocation procedure or a benefit sharing method or on expert opinion to estimate the benefit attributable to the space technology.
The INSAT system has played a key role in augmenting Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Meteorological services in the country and has contributed immensely to economic and social development. Satellite communication technologies are terrain and distance independent and they enable governments to achieve goals such as the development of backward and remote areas at low costs and in a short time and thereby achieve technological leapfrogging.
7.4.1. Television
The Major benefits of the INSAT system to Doordarshan (public TV) are expansion in area coverage from 14 per cent in 1983 to 78 per cent in 2005, population coverage from 26 per cent in 1983 to 90 per cent in 2005, increase in the number of channels from 2 to 32, remote area coverage, satellite news gathering, dissemination of weather and cyclone warning and use of TV as a media for training and education.
A detailed analysis show that for enhancing the population coverage further from 90 to 100 per cent with the distribution of a bouquet of 20 DD channels by the public broadcaster Doordarshan, the capital cost and annual operating cost through terrestrial technology is Rs.34560 million and Rs.5184 million respectively while a satellite based solution with direct reception at homes, would involve a capital cost of Rs.6380 million and annual operating cost of Rs.357 million. Thus, given the unique physiographical feature of India, the satellite communications is the least-cost option for achieving 100 per cent population coverage.
The growth of satellite TV has also aided in the emergence of new economic activities. The advent of satellite TV contributed to the growth of several industries like the manufacturing of TV sets, cables, receiving antenna and other equipment and program production. There are about 100,000 cable TV operators and about 35 million cable TV households in the country. The gross earnings of cable TV operators is nearing Rs. 10 billion.
7.4.2. Telecommunications
Remote area communication is an important objective of public policy. There is considerable cost savings due to use of satellite technology compared with the alternative of optical fiber cable network in remote area communication. The cost of connecting 393 remote areas, currently served by INSAT, by optical fibre cable would be Rs.23580 million while the comparable cost for satellite technology would be Rs.10460 million. It may be noted that there are 30,000 remote villages of similar nature needing connectivity. The other uses of satellite technology are: alternative media back up for terrestrial services, business communications, portable terminals for disaster management, Tele-medicine and Satellite Aided Search and Rescue.
Apart from the cost saving, there are many external benefits which are diffused economy-wide. In case of Andaman and Nicobar (AN), rapid expansion of telecom since the mid-nineties facilitated the integration of AN with the mainland thereby boosting the growth of industry, trade and tourism and raising the growth rate of gross state domestic product to more than 8 per cent.
7.4.3. Meterology
Satellites have made significant contributions to the generation of meteorological information by extending observation to oceans and remote areas on land, enabling generation of new types of observations, facilitating new concepts of data assimilation into models, reducing costs of a few types of observations and enhancing the reliability of certain types of data.
Meteorological services are recognized as public goods. The major contributions of satellite technology are in the areas of weather technology (cloud motion vector, wind-sea surface temperature and outgoing long wave radiation) and tropical cyclone (identification of genesis and current position, intensity of change and transmission of cyclone warnings). A comparative study of 1977 (before INSAT) and 1990 (after INSAT) cyclones which hit Andhra Pradesh, shows that even though the two cyclones are similar, due to the successful tracking of the cyclone in 1990 with the INSAT imaging instrument (VHRR) and the success of preparatory steps taken by the government, the loss of lives in 1990 was only 817 compared with 10,000 in 1977. This is an important incommensurable benefit of satellite technology.
7.4.4. Remote Sensing
The advantages of remote sensing are synoptic coverage, multi-spectral capability, multi-temporal capability and digital capture of data. Remote sensing technology is being used in three different situations. It is an exclusive tool for estimation of snow melt run-off, rapid assessment of areas affected by natural disasters, identification of potential fishing zones in offshore areas and mapping of inaccessible areas. It is a substitute tool to conventional methods in mapping of land use, waste lands, and urban land use; preparing ground water prospect maps, watershed development plan, coastal zone management plan etc; and in monitoring forest cover, urban sprawl, status of environment etc. It is a complement in cases like area and crop forecasting and urban development plans. Its advantage is that it yields unbiased, timely and enhanced information. Based on case studies of applications of remote sensing in India's development programs, Table 3 provides estimates of investments, direct returns, and economic benefits.
Apart from the major benefits enumerated above, the policy of self-reliance has also enabled internal competence building and technology development and spin-offs to non-space sectors. For example, the spin-off outputs till 2005 include 224 Technology Transfers, 165 patents, 10 trademarks and 17 copyrights. ISRO has nurtured a symbiotic partnership with more than 500 Indian firms. The flow of funds to industry currently is about 40 per cent of the space budget. This partnership has generated significant spin-off effects to the industries in terms of improved manufacturing processes, quality control and management practices.
Table 3: Investments and Benefits in Remote Sensing
| A | Investments | Rs. Millions |
| Operational Missions | 10,080 | |
| Data Reception, Processing and Applications | 5,540 |
| B | Direct Returns | |
| 1. | Returns from sale of Satellite Data and Value Added Products by NDC | 1,600 |
| 2. | Returns from ANTRIX through access fees and royalty | 600 |
| 3. | Opportunity cost (cost of foreign satellite data equivalent to IRS data used). | ~ 5,000 |
| 4. | Cost saving due to value addition | ~ 12,000 |
| 5. | Cost saving due to mapping using RS data | ~ 11,000 |
| C | Economic Benefits | Rs. Millions | ||
| Program | Nature of Benefit | Estimate from Case Studies | Potential Benefit to the country in the Long-run | |
| 1. | National Drinking Water Technology Mission | Cost saving due to increase in success rate | 2,560 (5 States) | 5,000 – 8,000 |
| 2. | Urban Area Perspective / Development / Zonal / Amenities Plan for Cities / Towns | Cost saving in mapping | 50.4 (6 Cities) | 16,000 – 20,000 |
| 3. | Forest Working Plan | Cost saving in mapping | 2,000 (200 Divisions) | 11,860 |
| 4. | Potential Fishing Zone Advisories | Cost saving due to avoidance of trips in non-PFZ advisories | 5,450 | 16,350 |
| 5. | Wasteland Mapping: Solid Land Reclamation | Productivity gain | 990 (UP) | 24,690 |
| 6. | Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development: Horticultural Development in Land With and Without Shrub | Gross income | Rs.0.20 to 0.40 (per hectare) | 13,000 – 26,000 |
| 7. | Bio-prospecting for Medicinal Herbs | Value of Indian life saving drugs | 800 | |
Note: 1US $ = Rs. 45.
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Obama Moves to Counter China With Pentagon-NASA Link (Update1)
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama
Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) -- President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.'s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China.
Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team.
The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China's space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty battlefield eyes of the military.
"The Obama administration will have all those issues on the table," said Neal Lane, who served as President Bill Clinton's science adviser and wrote recently that Obama must make early decisions critical to retaining U.S. space dominance. "The foreign affairs and national security implications have to be considered."
China, which destroyed one of its aging satellites in a surprise missile test in 2007, is making strides in its spaceflight program. The military-run effort carried out a first spacewalk in September and aims to land a robotic rover on the moon in 2012, with a human mission several years later.
A Level of Proficiency
"If China puts a man on the moon, that in itself isn't necessarily a threat to the U.S.," said Dean Cheng, a senior Asia analyst with CNA Corp., an Alexandria, Virginia-based national-security research firm. "But it would suggest that China had reached a level of proficiency in space comparable to that of the United States."
Obama has said the Pentagon's space program -- which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA's budget -- could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending.
NASA faces a five-year gap between the retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 and the first launch of Orion, the six- person craft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and eventually the moon. Obama has said he would like to narrow that gap, during which the U.S. will pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the station.
NASA Resistance
The Obama team has asked NASA officials about the costs and savings of scrapping the agency's new Ares I rocket, which is being developed by Chicago-based Boeing Co. and Minneapolis- based Alliant Techsystems Inc.
NASA chief Michael Griffin opposes the idea and told Obama's transition team leader, Lori Garver, that her colleagues lack the engineering background to evaluate rocket options, agency spokesman Chris Shank said.
"The NASA review team is just asking questions; no decisions have been made," said Nick Shapiro, a transition spokesman for Obama. The team will pass its finding on to presidential appointees, said Shapiro.
At the Pentagon, there may be support for combining launch vehicles. While NASA hasn't recently approached the Pentagon about using its Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, building them for manned missions could allow for cost sharing, said Steven Huybrechts, the director of space programs and policy in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is staying on into the new administration.
The Delta IV and Atlas V are built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp., and typically are used to carry satellites.
Already Developed
"No one really has a firm idea what NASA's cost savings might be, but the military's launch vehicles are basically developed," said John Logsdon, a policy expert at Washington's National Air and Space Museum who has conferred with Obama's transition advisers. "You don't have to build them from scratch."
Meanwhile, Chinese state-owned companies already are assembling heavy-lift rockets that could reach the moon, with a first launch scheduled for 2013. All that would be left to build for a manned mission is an Apollo-style lunar lander, said Griffin, who visited the Chinese space program in 2006.
Moon Landing
Griffin said in July that he believes China will be able to put people on the moon before the U.S. goes back in 2020. The last Apollo mission left the lunar surface in 1972.
"The moon landing is an extremely challenging and sophisticated task, and it is also a strategically important technological field," Wang Zhaoyao, a spokesman for China's space program, said in September, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
China plans to dock two spacecraft in orbit in 2010, a skill required for a lunar mission.
"An automated rendezvous does all sorts of things for your missile accuracy and anti-satellite programs," said John Sheldon, a visiting professor of advanced air and space studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. "The manned effort is about prestige, but it's also a good way of testing technologies that have defense applications."
China's investments in anti-satellite warfare and in "cyberwarfare," ballistic missiles and other weaponry "could threaten the United States' primary means to project its power and help its allies in the Pacific: bases, air and sea assets, and the networks that support them," Gates wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Anti-Satellite Warfare
China is designing satellites that, once launched, could catch up with and destroy U.S. spy and communication satellites, said a Nov. 20 report to Congress from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. China's State Council Information Office declined to comment on the nation's anti- satellite or manned programs.
To boost cooperation between NASA and the Pentagon, Obama has promised to revive the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which oversaw the entire space arena for four presidents, most actively from 1958 to 1973.
The move would build ties between agencies with different cultures and agendas.
"Whether such cooperation would succeed remains to be seen," said Scott Pace, a former NASA official who heads the Washington-based Space Policy Institute. "But the questions are exactly the ones the Obama team needs to ask."
To contact the reporter on this story: Demian McLean in Washington at dmclean8@bloomberg.net.
The Militarization of Outer Space: The Pentagon's Space Warriors
 Back in 2005, The New York Times reported that General Lance W. Lord, then commander of AFSPC, told an Air Force conference that "space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. ... Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future." |
for Global Research
Quebec City, Canada (SPX) May 11, 2010
It's not as if things aren't bad enough right here on planet earth. What with multiple wars and occupations, an accelerating economic meltdown, corporate malfeasance and environmental catastrophes such as the petroleum-fueled apocalypse in the Gulf of Mexico, I'd say we have a full plate already.
Now the Defense Department wants to up the stakes with new, destabilizing weapons systems that will transform low- and high-earth orbit into another "battlespace," pouring billions into programs to achieve what Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) has long dreamed of: "space dominance."
Indeed, Pentagon space warriors fully intend to field a robust anti-satellite (ASAT) capability that can disable, damage or destroy the satellites of other nations, all for "defensive" purposes, mind you.
Back in 2005, The New York Times reported that General Lance W. Lord, then commander of AFSPC, told an Air Force conference that "space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. ... Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
Five years on, that "mission" is still a top priority for the Obama administration. While some might call it "net-centric warfare" on steroids, I'd choose another word: madness.
Air Force X-37B
On April 22, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) successfully launched its robot space shuttle, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Sitting atop a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket, the unmanned, reusable space plane roared into orbit after more than ten years of development by Boeing Corporation's "Phantom Works" black projects shop.
The successful orbital insertion of the X-37B was the culmination of a decades' long dream by the Department of Defense: to field a reusable spacecraft that combines an airplane's agility with the means to travel at 5 miles per second in orbit.
From the Pentagon's point of view, a craft such as the X-37B may be the harbinger of things to come: a johnny-on-the-spot weapons platform to take out the satellite assets of an enemy de jour, or as a launch vehicle that can deliver bombs, missiles or kinetic weapons anywhere on earth in less than two hours; what Air Force wags refer to as "operationally responsive space."
Prior to launch, Air Force Deputy Undersecretary of Space Programs, Gary Payton, ridiculed speculation that the X-37B is the prototype for a new space-based weapons system. Payton told reporters, "I don't know how this could be called a weaponization of space. Fundamentally, it's just an updated version of the space shuttle kinds of activities in space."
Needless to say, such denials should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
The highly-classified program has a checkered history. According to GlobalSecurity.org, the project is envisaged as a "reusable space architecture" that would provide "aircraft-like operability, flexibility, and responsiveness, supporting AF Space Command mission areas."
While early examples such as the Dyna-Soar/X-20 program of the 1950s-1960s never panned out due to technological constraints, the Air Force never stopped trying. Programs such as the X-40 Space Maneuver Vehicle (SMV) and the X-41 Common Air Vehicle (CAV), a hypersonic craft intended to serve as a key component in developing the off-again, on-again "Prompt Global Strike" project, demonstrate continuing Air Force interest in "high frontier" weapons programs.
The X-40 project eventually merged with the Air Force's X-37B program and the X-41 CAV program has been absorbed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2).
Last month, the first test of the Falcon (apparently) ended in failure when DARPA researchers claimed they had lost contact with the craft moments after take-off from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Falcon was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of launching a vehicle to the edge of space and then have it come "screaming back into the atmosphere, maneuvering at twenty times the speed of sound before landing north of the Kwajalein Atoll, 30 minutes later and 4100 nautical miles away," according to Wired.
Did the HTV-2 mission fail? Since misdirection and disinformation have long been staples of Pentagon black world projects, most likely we'll never know one way or the other.
Inevitably, even if these projects amount to no more than monumental failures, their intended target audience, China, Russia or any other nation viewed as a "rogue state" by the imperialist hyperpower, in all likelihood would be drawn in to an expensive, and deadly, contest to devise countermeasures.
In this light, Space.com reporter Jeremy Hsu wrote May 5, that ambiguities in devising militarized space technology "can make it tricky for nations to gauge the purpose or intentions behind new prototypes." And such uncertainties are precisely the fodder that fuel an arms race.
According to GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike, the U.S. military "could even be using the cloak of mystery to deliberately bamboozle and confuse rival militaries." Pike told Space.com that "the X-37B and HTV-2 projects could represent the tip of a space weapons program hidden within the Pentagon's secret 'black budget,' or they might be nothing more than smoke and mirrors."
Pike said that current work "leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation or even outright deception, which could be a ploy to distract other nations with military space projects."
"'One of them could be a deception program and the other could be the spitting image of the real thing,' Pike noted. He said that such misdirection could force other nations' militaries to waste money chasing down dead ends."
While Pike's assertions sound plausible, given the Pentagon's track record and an annual $50 billion black budget directed towards research on new weapons and surveillance systems, the X-37B, the Falcon HTV-2 or other systems on the drawing board would certainly be useful assets if the military chose to deploy them as offensive weapons.
A Space Bomber?
Less ambitious perhaps, but potentially more destabilizing than unproven hypersonic technology, the X-37B was originally designed by Boeing for NASA in 1999 as an emergency escape vehicle for the International Space Station.
The civilian agency once viewed the craft as a potential lifeboat that could rescue stranded astronauts from the ISS. However, with Russia's Soyuz space capsule doing yeoman's work for just such a contingency, NASA no longer saw the need for an expensive winged re-entry vehicle and dropped the program.
But, as with all things having to do with the Military-Industrial Complex's insatiable appetite for new weapons, DARPA, the Pentagon's "blue sky" geek shop, picked up the slack in 2004 when NASA headed towards the exit.
After further testing and design enhancements by DARPA, the project was handed off to the Air Force in 2006. The program is now run by the USAF's secretive Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO) and spokespeople there have been tight lipped, refusing to say how much the vehicle costs; a sure sign that funds for the robot shuttle come from the black side of the budget where new weapons systems spawn and metastasize.
A tip-off to the covert nature--and militaristic intentions--of the program, comes from the office running the show. According to an Air Force Fact Sheet, the RCO "responds to Combat Air Force and combatant command requirements" and "expedites development and fielding of select Department of Defense combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities."
According to investigative journalist Sharon Weinberger, the author of Imaginary Weapons and A Nuclear Family Vacation, her recent piece in Popular Mechanics, revealed that prior to the Pentagon assuming ownership of the X-37 project, "the spacecraft was regarded as just another experimental prototype." Today however, Weinberger wrote, "Air Force officials are skittish to mention even the smallest details."
When Air Force chief scientist Werner J.A. Dahm was asked by Weinberger "what he could say about the X-37B," he replied, "'Nothing very useful,' before quickly changing the subject."
In a 2006 piece in Air Force Print News (AFPN) however, we were informed that the X-37B will "will serve as a test platform for satellites and other space technologies. The vehicle allows satellite sensors, subsystems, components and associated technology to be transported into the environment where they will be used--space."
With information scarce on what the OTV's current mission is, the Air Force has said that after the first few flights (a second test in slated for 2011), "you get into the realm of using it as a reusable space test platform--putting space components into its experimental bay and taking them to space for testing," RCO's X-37B program manager Lt. Col. Kevin Walker told AFPN.
While the Air Force has denied that the X-37B is the vanguard for a space-based system to be deployed for spying or as an orbital weapons' delivery platform, and while this may betechnically accurate in so far as the mini-shuttle is a prototype, the vagaries of the project raise intriguing questions.
This is borne out by an April 22 announcement by the 45th Space Wing Public Affairs office at Patrick Air Force base. Deputy Undersecretary Payton said "if these technologies on the vehicle prove to be as good as we estimate, it will make our access to space more responsive, perhaps cheaper, and push us in the vector toward being able to react to warfighter needs more quickly."
This was seconded by Col. Andre Lovett, 45th Space Wing vice commander: "This launch helps ensure that our warfighters will be provided the capabilities they need in the future."
Nothing ambiguous in these statements as to how the USAF views the future role for the system, nor do they bear a relationship to Payton's earlier claim to reporters that the X-37B is "just an updated version of the space shuttle kinds of activities in space."
Weinberger notes that "the most daring job of a space plane, and the one least discussed, is the role of a bomber." According to Weinberger, the X-37B "could fly over targets within an hour of launch to release cone-shaped re-entry vehicles that would both protect and guide weapons through the atmosphere."
Equally destabilizing, a craft such as the X-37B "could carry 1000- or 2000-pound re-entry vehicles armed with precision munitions like bunker-busting penetrators or small-diameter bombs, or simply use the explosive impact of kinetic rods cratering at hypersonic speeds to destroy targets."
Joan Johnson-Freese, a Professor of National Security Studies at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, told Space.comjournalist Leonard David last month that "other countries" will likely view the X-37B "as another capability intended to assure the United States will be able to dominate access to and the use of space."
William Scott, coauthor of the militaristic novel Counterspace: The Next Hours of World War III, told David that a reusable space plane "could deliver small satellites having specific, limited roles to bridge critical capabilities gaps."
The former bureau chief for Aviation Week and Space Technologytold David that amongst the most vital characteristics for fielding a weapons' platform such as the X-37B is surprise: "On the first orbit, a space plane could capture data, before the 'target' knew it was coming." Since a space plane could be "launched into any orbit, at any inclination, providing prompt 'eyes-on' of virtually any area of the world," unlike a satellite with known, predictable trajectories, it could also be used as a surveillance platform or even as a means to surreptitiously "kidnap" or disable an adversary's satellite.
Seconding Weinberger's assessment, Scott told Space.com that "ultimately, weapons could be delivered from a space plane in low Earth orbit." As noted above, these could come in the form of "precision" munitions or insane hypervelocity rod bundles, so called "Rods from God," tungsten projectiles lobbed from space at 36,000 feet per second that can "hit a cross-haired target on the ground."
"I did a story about the rods concept in 1994 or 1995, based on concepts being discussed in the U.S. Air Force at the time," Scott said. "Fifteen years later, maybe they're ready for testing."
This view is shared by Everett Dolman, a professor of Comparative Military Studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at the Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.
"Regardless of its original intent, Dolman told Space.com, "the most obvious and formidable is in service as a space fighter--a remotely piloted craft capable of disabling multiple satellites in orbit on a single mission and staying on orbit for months to engage newly orbited platforms." A project such as the X-37B, more advanced systems still on the drawing-board or in development in any number of Air Force black sites such as Groom Lake (Area 51) "would be a tremendous tactical advantage," Dolman said.
Even were the system not to be transformed into a space bomber, Dolman theorized that the X-37B could be maneuvered close to an adversary's satellite and capture details in the form of signals intelligence. "With the anticipated increase in networked-microsatellites in the next few years, such a platform might be the best--and only--means of collecting technical intelligence in space."
While the system may evolve into a destabilizing new weapon, Dolman said that "all of the information leaked about the X-37B suggests its primary function will be as a test platform, but a test platform for what?"
Regardless of how the X-37B prototype pans out, we can be certain that as the U.S. imperialist empire continues its long trek on the road towards failed statehood, the Pentagon, always eager to expend the blood and treasure of the American people on endless wars of conquest, will continue to build new and ever-more destabilizing weapons.
Air Force Space Command
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Air Force Space Command | |
|---|---|
 Air Force Space Command emblem | |
| Active | September 1982–present |
| Country | United States |
| Branch | Air Force |
| Type | Major Command |
| Role | Development and operation of military space technologies |
| Size | 47,000 |
| Garrison/HQ | Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado |
| Nickname | AFSPC |
| Commanders | |
| Commander | Gen C. Robert Kehler |
| Vice Commander | Maj Gen Michael J Basla |
| Chief Master Sergeant | CMSgt Richard T. Small |
Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) is a major command of the United States Air Force. AFSPC is headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. Its current commander is General C. Robert "Bob" Kehler.
Approximately 47,000 people, including 25,400 active-duty military and civilians, and 14,000 contractor employees, perform AFSPC missions at 88 locations worldwide. Those 25,400 active-duty personnel are divided into approximately 7,100 military employees and 18,300 civilian employees, although their missions overlap.
AFSPC contributes to United States deterrence tying together and supporting the U.S. military worldwide through the use of many different types of satellites and other space operations.
On October 6, 2008, it was announced that the ballistic missile mission will be transferred to the new Air Force Global Strike Command. This transfer took place in December, 2009. At the same time, it was also announced that AFSPC will gain the cyber warfare mission. AFSPC gained the cyber warfare mission with the stand-up of 24th Air Force under AFSPC in August 2009.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Mission
AFSPC describes its mission as being, "To provide an integrated constellation of space and cyberspace capabilities at the speed of need."[1] AFSPC claims its activities make space reliable to United States warfighters (i.e. forces personnel) by assuring their access to space.
AFSPC's primary mission areas:
- Space forces support involves launching satellites and other high-value payloads into space using a variety of expendable launch vehicles and operating those satellites once in the medium of space.
- Space control ensures friendly use of space through the conduct of counterspace operations encompassing surveillance, negation, protection and space intelligence analysis.[2]
- Force enhancement provides weather, communications, intelligence, missile warning, and navigation. Force enhancement is support to the warfighter.
[edit] History
Missile warning and space operations were combined to form Air Force Space Command in 1982. During the Cold War, space operations focused on missile warning, and command and control for national leadership. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm provided emphasis for the command's new focus on support to the warfighter. ICBM forces were merged into AFSPC in 1993.
[edit] Possible New Mission
A recent Pentagon report[3] suggested that the command be renamed the Air Force Strategic Command The report suggested that the Air Force place all strategic nuclear bombers in a separate numbered air force (NAF) which would be in charge of all Air Force controlled strategic nuclear weapons, not just ICBMs.[4][5] The Air Force rejected this recommendation on October 6, 2008, and instead decided to create the new Air Force Global Strike Command that would carry out the ICBM and bomber missions.
[edit] Organization
[edit] Numbered Air Forces
Air Force Space Command has two active Numbered Air Forces (NAFs) and one tentative NAF.
[edit] Fourteenth Air Force
The Fourteenth Air Force provides space warfighting forces to U.S. Strategic Command in its capacity as Air Forces Strategic-Space, and is located at Vandenberg AFB, California. It manages the generation and employment of space forces to support U.S. Strategic Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operational plans and missions.
[edit] Twenty-Fourth Air Force
The Twenty-fourth Air Force, with the cyber warfare mission, was activated under AFSPC in August 2009, at Lackland Air Force Base.
[edit] Direct Reporting Units
AFSPC is the major command providing space forces and trained cyber warfare forces for U.S. Strategic Command. AFSPC also supports NORAD with ballistic missile warning information, operates the Space Warfare Center to develop space applications for direct warfighter support, and is responsible for the Department of Defense's ICBM follow-on operational test and evaluation program.
[edit] Space and Missile Systems Center
The Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) at Los Angeles AFB, California, designs and acquires all Air Force and most Department of Defense space systems. It oversees launches, completes on-orbit checkouts, then turns systems over to user agencies. It supports the Program Executive Office for Space on the NAVSTAR Global Positioning, Defense Satellite Communications and MILSTAR systems. SMC also supports the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and the Follow-on Early Warning System. In addition, it supports development and acquisition of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Air Force Program Executive Office for Strategic Systems.
[edit] Space Innovation and Development Center
The Space Innovation and Development Center (SIDC) at Schriever AFB, Colorado is also part of the command. The center plays a major role in fully integrating space systems into the operational Air Force. Its force enhancement mission looks at ways to use space systems to support warfighters in the areas of navigation, weather, intelligence, communications and theater ballistic missile warning, and how these apply to theater operations.
[edit] Locations
The AFSPC headquarters is a major unit located at Peterson AFB, Colorado. There are 6 AFSPC host bases:
- Buckley AFB, Colorado
- Los Angeles AFB, California
- Space and Missile Systems Center
- 61st Air Base Wing
- Military Satellite Communications Systems Wing
- Global Positioning Systems Wing
- Space-Based Infrared Systems Wing
- Launch and Range Systems Wing
- Space Superiority Systems Wing
- Space Development and Test Wing (Kirtland AFB, New Mexico)
- 526th ICBM Systems Group (Hill AFB, Utah)
- Patrick AFB, Florida
- Peterson AFB, Colorado
- Schriever AFB, Colorado
- Vandenberg AFB, California
AFSPC also operates several Air Force Stations for launch support and early warning missions.
- Cape Cod Air Force Station, Massachusetts
- Cavalier AFS, North Dakota
- Cheyenne Mountain AFS, Colorado
- Clear Air Force Station, Alaska
- New Boston AFS, New Hampshire
- Onizuka AFS, California
- 21st Space Operations Squadron
- Slated for closure in July 2010 [6]
[edit] Space capabilities
Spacelift operations at the East and West Coast launch bases provide services, facilities and range safety control for the conduct of DOD, NASA and commercial launches. Through the command and control of all DOD satellites, satellite operators provide force-multiplying effects—continuous global coverage, low vulnerability and autonomous operations. Satellites provide essential in-theater secure communications, weather and navigational data for ground, air and fleet operations and threat warning. Ground-based radar and Defense Support Program satellites monitor ballistic missile launches around the world to guard against a surprise missile attack on North America. Space surveillance radars provide vital information on the location of satellites and space debris for the nation and the world.
[edit] Resources
[edit] Satellites
- Global Positioning System
- Defense Satellite Communications System
- Defense Meteorological Satellite Program
- Defense Support Program
- NATO III and IV communications
- Fleet Satellite Communications System UHF follow-on
- MILSTAR
[edit] Launch Vehicles
[edit] Space Situational Awareness
- Air Force Satellite Control Network
- Maui Optical Tracking Identification Facility,
- Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System
- Passive Space Surveillance System
- Rapid Attack Identification Detection Reporting System
[edit] Ballistic Missile Warning Radars
- AN/FPS-115 PAVE PAWS
- AN/FPS-108 Cobra Dane
- AN/FPQ-16 Perimeter Acquisition Radar Characterization System (PARCS)
- Sea-based X-band Radar Sea-Based X-Band Radar
- Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS)
[edit] In popular culture
In the TV series Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, the Stargate Program is run by the Air Force Space Command. (Stargate Command is a sub-command under the Space Command.) The AF Space Command Patch was worn on the uniform of personnel aboard the Prometheus, Earth's first operational deep space battle cruiser.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Air Force Historical Research Agency. This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Government document "http://www.afspc.af.mil".
- ^ US Air Force. "Fact Sheets : Air Force Space Command". AFSPC. http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=155. Retrieved 2010-05-15.
- ^ Mixed signals over Chinese missiles
- ^ http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/Phase_I_Report_Sept_10.pdf
- ^ "Report of the Secretary of Defense Task Force on DoD Nuclear Weapons Management," also known as the Schlesinger Report after the Task Force's chair
- ^ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26679218
- ^ See http://www.schriever.af.mil/onizuka/index.asp
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For Immediate Release:November 12, 2009
Contact: Mary Trupo (202) 482-3809
AEROSPACE SUPPLIER DEVELOPMENT MISSION TO INDIA OPENS DOORS FOR AMERICAN COMPANIES
WASHINGTON – The aerospace sector in India ranks among the world's most dynamic, with airlines in India expected to procure more than $35 billion in equipment during the next five years. The United States Government, through the International Trade Administration, led an Aerospace Supplier Development Mission to India November 9-13, 2009, to help American businesses tap in to the vast Indian market.
The mission, headed by Deputy Assistant Secretary Karen Zens, included 11 U.S. aerospace companies and promoted US- India trade ties. The delegation visited New Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad to introduce U.S. companies to key industry and government officials, potential strategic business partners and end-users for their products and services.
"The Indian market is particularly promising for U.S. suppliers seeking joint-venture opportunities. The evolution of the Indian aerospace industry is a part of a broader trend toward supply chain consolidation. This mission is one of many steps we are taking to foster and strengthen the relationships between U.S. companies and potential partners in India," Zens said.
Participating U.S. companies, including several small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), represent a wide range of aerospace component and service suppliers. During the mission, companies met with potential partners in India to establish business relations. Participants included Carlton Forge Works; David H. Sutherland & Company; Eaton Technologies; Esterline; FLIR Systems; Greenerd Press & Machine Company; Impex International; Industry Metals International; International Rite-Way Products; Kaman Aerostructures; and PCC Structurals.
India represents a large and growing market for air defense equipment, estimated at $5 billion annually. The visit, coordinated by the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service offices in the United States and India, should help U.S. companies enter and expand their sales in the Indian market.
The goal of this and future SME-focused missions of the International Trade Administration to India is to strengthen partnerships between U.S. and Indian firms to foster innovation and create new jobs.
For more information about the Aerospace Supplier Development Mission to India, please visit http://www.buyusa.gov/.
India and the US: partners or rivals in space?
by Jeff Foust
Monday, February 11, 2008
Near the end of his speech before the Space Transportation Association last month, NASA administrator Mike Griffin was asked to assess the state of America's competition in the realm of human spaceflight (see "Defending Constellation", The Space Review, February 4, 2008). He responded, predictably enough, with his concern that China would get back to the Moon before the US. He also praised Russia for continuing with its program through the turmoil of recent years, and said that he expected that Russia would also eventually send humans beyond low Earth orbit.
Griffin then threw out one more statement about another spacefaring nation, one that—as yet—has no human spaceflight capability: "India is not going to allow on the Asian continent for a Chinese capability that they don't have." That statement is an acknowledgement that the next government to launch humans into space is likely not going to be Europe or Japan—which have the technical capability but currently lack the political will—but instead India, which is rapidly developing both the technologies and political support needed for such a project. And should India succeed, it will be with very different—although as yet uncertain—ramifications for the US.
| "I can confidently say that that vision of Dr. Sarabhai has been fulfilled," Nair said, referring to the founder of the Indian space program and his emphasis on practical applications. "Today, we are at a turning point. We are looking at what's next." |
For the last few years India's space program has been in a state of transition. Since its inception in the early 1960s, India's space efforts have been focused on practical applications. The nation eschewed not just human spaceflight but also robotic space exploration in favor of applications like communications and remote sensing that promised practical benefits to the Indian people (see "The other rising Asian space power", The Space Review, December 18, 2006). Space was seen primarily as a means to raise the standard of living of a relatively poor nation, not as a tool of geopolitical prestige.
That approach has largely been a success for India. In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington on January 30, G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), recapped the accomplishments of his agency in support of the Indian people. Indian remote sensing satellites have been used in roles ranging from disaster management to helping identify sources of drinking water in dry regions of the country. The nation's fleet of communications satellites beams television programming into millions of homes, and also supports telemedicine and distance learning applications. India's space program "is highly need-based, harnessing the high technology for space… to benefit the common man," Nair said.
There is, though, a growing belief in India that this "need-based" approach, which dates back to the founder of the Indian space effort, Vikram Sarabhai, needs to evolve. "I can confidently say that that vision of Dr. Sarabhai has been fulfilled," Nair said. "Today, we are at a turning point. We are looking at what's next."
The process for determining that next phase is already underway, with Nair describing a "brainstorming session" by the Indian scientific community. "They all came to the unanimous conclusion that space is going to be the next frontier of humankind," he said. "It's not only just looking at the planet Earth and trying to understand it and look for new resources in a very efficient manner for improving the life of other people, but space exploration will also play a very major role."
The first step in that new emphasis on space exploration is approaching launch. Chandrayaan-1, the first Indian spacecraft to go the Moon, is scheduled for launch in April. The orbiter is carrying a suite of instruments from India as well as international partners, including two from the US: a mineralology mapper and a synthetic aperture radar.
Chandrayaan-1 is the first in what Nair envisions as a series of lunar missions for ISRO. "We are trying to look at what next, perhaps not only orbiting around the Moon but landing on the Moon and then trying to put some rovers, picking up samples, analyzing and relaying back," he said. India has already signed an agreement with Russia to cooperate on the development of Chandrayaan-2, a mission Nair described as featuring both an orbiter and a lander. That mission would be launched in 2011 or 2012, he said. He added that he is open to additional international cooperation for that and other missions: "if there is an overwhelming interest in such missions, we won't mind having another launch of another Chandrayaan, maybe Chandryaan-3."
Then there is India's growing interest in human spaceflight. While Nair did not address that in his prepared remarks, he was asked about ISRO's plans in that area during a question-and-answer session that followed. "Right now we are in the conceptual study phase," he said. "Of course, we recognize that the capability to have a man in space is very important to future exploration." The design study is nearing completion, after which time ISRO plans to approach the government for funding. Once approved, Nair said it would take the agency seven or eight years to carry out the program and place humans in orbit.
Such an effort won't come cheaply. While less than $10 million has been spent to date on human spaceflight studies, Nair estimated that the total development cost of a human spaceflight program for India would be about $2.5 billion. That's a pittance for NASA, which spends more than that each year on the shuttle program, but is far larger than ISRO's entire annual budget, which, despite recent increases, is still well under $1 billion a year.
| "We believe that international cooperation, rather than competition, is going to be the norm for the future," said Nair. |
Should India make that investment, it would likely become the fourth country in the world with the ability to send humans into space (although it may be beat by one or more private ventures developing human orbital spaceflight systems.) That would further open the door to international cooperation—or competition—with countries like the US. India already has a long record of cooperation in space matters with the US, Russia, and Europe, although not with China: Nair noted in his speech that the only cooperation currently between India and China—rivals for primacy in Asia—is the sale of Indian remote sensing data to the Chinese government.
While Griffin hinted in his comments last month that India might rise to be another challenger to the US in space, right now the two countries are on a path towards cooperation, not competition. Just two days after Nair's CSIS speech, he and Griffin signed a "framework agreement" outlining how NASA and ISRO can cooperate in future space ventures. "This agreement will allow us to cooperate effectively on a wide range of programs of mutual interest," Griffin said in a statement announcing the agreement. "India has extensive space-related experience, capabilities and infrastructure, and will continue to be a welcome partner in NASA's future space exploration activities."
This cooperation has paralleled improving relations between the US and India. "When I was in charge of South Asia policy in the State Department, space was basically taboo," said Teresita Schaffer, director of the South Asia Program at CSIS, in remarks introducing Nair. During that period, the late 1980s and early 1990s, the taboo was linked to concerns about the transfer of advanced technologies, which meant, she said, "basically anything involving getting stuff from Earth up was off-limits."
While technology transfer concerns still exist, overall relations between the two nations have improved, which Schaffer credited to several factors, including the end of the Cold War, India's economic growth, and the growing prominence of the Indian-American community in the US. "Fifteen years after the Cold War officially ended," she said, "we have arrived at a point where the Indian and US governments, I think, have put in place much of the bilateral infrastructure we need for a more serious partnership in today's world."
All this suggests that, unlike China (which is clearly perceived as a rival to the US in space, even if fears of a new space race are overblown) and Russia (which is currently a partner in the ISS, but is increasingly looking to flex its muscles in space as it tries to revive its status as a superpower), India's relationship with the US in space is likely to be far more cooperative than competitive, something Nair agrees with in general. "We believe that international cooperation, rather than competition, is going to be the norm for the future."
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site and the Space Politics and Personal Spaceflight weblogs. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone, and do not represent the official positions of any organization or company, including the Futron Corporation, the author's employer.
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http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1056/1
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Sunday, March 5, 2006
Source: Department of State
Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science
Washington, DC
March 2, 2006
As part of his overall effort to reinvigorate our relationship with India, President Bush issued a joint statement with then Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee on November 9, 2001. Among other issues, the two leaders agreed to initiate discussion on civil space cooperation. On January 12, 2004, President Bush and Prime Minister Vajpayee announced the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), which proposed expanded engagement on civilian nuclear activities, civilian space programs and high-technology trade based on a series of reciprocal steps. President Bush and Prime Minister Singh further expanded these commitments to civil space cooperation in their Joint Statement of July 18, 2005, pledging to build closer ties in space exploration, satellite navigation and launch, and in the commercial space arena through mechanisms such as the U.S.-India Working Group on Civil Space Cooperation (JWG).
The JWG held its inaugural meeting in Bangalore on June 29-30, 2005, and identified new and expanded areas for civil space cooperation. Progress has been made since on several issues, including negotiating of the Memorandums of Understanding to place two instruments provided by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on India's Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission, negotiations on space launch agreements, and discussions on promoting interoperability between Indian and U.S. civil space-based positioning, navigation and timing systems.
The Chandrayaan-1 mission is an important step forward in U.S.-India space ties. Negotiations have taken place for two NASA instruments -- a Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar to map ice deposits in the Moon's polar regions and a Moon Mineralogy Mapper to assess mineral resources of the Moon -- to join India's instruments in mutual exploration of the Moon. The Chandrayaan-1 mission will be a major advance for U.S./Indian civil space cooperation, as well as for the scientific activities critical to President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration.
Once finalized, the Technology Safeguards Agreement and Commercial Space Launch Agreement together will facilitate further endeavors of commercial and civilian space cooperation.
The United States and India have been cooperating on space for decades. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cooperate with India on aerosol monitoring. NOAA is working with India on monitoring of drought and malaria outbreaks, and they have agreed in principle to establish an earth reception station in India to support worldwide timely environmental data collection. An agreement established over 8 years ago by NASA, NOAA, India's Department of Space and India's Department of Science and Technology in the area of Earth and atmospheric sciences has yielded cooperative efforts in measurement of tropical rainfall, long-range forecasting of regional climate over India, and improving the understanding of summer monsoon variability. India contracted with a major U.S. firm to develop an augmentation of the GPS navigation system to modernize its air traffic control system, with strong support from the Department of Transportation and the FAA. India participates in the international GLOBE program of science education supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation and the State Department. India and the U.S. also collaborate on international programs, including the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters, the COSPAS-SARSAT search and rescue program, and a telemedicine project in Afghanistan. NOAA, NASA, and other U.S. agencies are working with India through the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations to develop and operate a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).
Related links
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=19182
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Saturday, July 17, 2010
Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
"Like a globe-trotting shutterbug, WISE has completed a world tour with 1.3 million slides covering the whole sky," said Edward Wright, the principal investigator of the mission at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Some of these images have been processed and stitched together into a new picture being released today. It shows the Pleiades cluster of stars, also known as the Seven Sisters, resting in a tangled bed of wispy dust. The pictured region covers seven square degrees, or an area equivalent to 35 full moons, highlighting the telescope's ability to take wide shots of vast regions of space.
The new picture was taken in February. It shows infrared light from WISE's four detectors in a range of wavelengths. This infrared view highlights the region's expansive dust cloud, through which the Seven Sisters and other stars in the cluster are passing. Infrared light also reveals the smaller and cooler stars of the family.
To view the new image, as well as previously released WISE images, visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .
"The WISE all-sky survey is helping us sift through the immense and diverse population of celestial objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It's a great example of the high impact science that's possible from NASA's Explorer Program."
The first release of WISE data, covering about 80 percent of the sky, will be delivered to the astronomical community in May of next year. The mission scanned strips of the sky as it orbited around the Earth's poles since its launch last December. WISE always stays over the Earth's day-night line. As the Earth moves around the sun, new slices of sky come into the telescope's field of view. It has taken six months, or the amount of time for Earth to travel halfway around the sun, for the mission to complete one full scan of the entire sky.
For the next three months, the mission will map half of the sky again. This will enhance the telescope's data, revealing more hidden asteroids, stars and galaxies. The mapping will give astronomers a look at what's changed in the sky. The mission will end when the instrument's block of solid hydrogen coolant, needed to chill its infrared detectors, runs out.
"The eyes of WISE have not blinked since launch," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Both our telescope and spacecraft have performed flawlessly and have imaged every corner of our universe, just as we planned."
So far, WISE has observed more than 100,000 asteroids, both known and previously unseen. Most of these space rocks are in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, some are near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth. WISE has discovered more than 90 of these new near-Earth objects. The infrared telescope is also good at spotting comets that orbit far from Earth and has discovered more than a dozen of these so far.
WISE's infrared vision also gives it a unique ability to pick up the glow of cool stars, called brown dwarfs, in addition to distant galaxies bursting with light and energy. These galaxies are called ultra-luminous infrared galaxies. WISE can see the brightest of them.
"WISE is filling in the blanks on the infrared properties of everything in the universe from nearby asteroids to distant quasars," said Peter Eisenhardt of JPL, project scientist for WISE. "But the most exciting discoveries may well be objects we haven't yet imagined exist."
JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about WISE, visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .
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Space accidents and incidents
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (March 2010) |
Space accidents, either during operations or training for spaceflights, have killed 22 astronauts (five percent of all people who have been in space, two percent of individual spaceflights[1]), and a much larger number of people on the ground.
This article provides an overview of all known fatalities and near-fatalities that occurred during manned space missions, accidents during astronaut training and during the testing, assembling or preparing for flight of manned and unmanned spacecraft. Not included are fatalities occurring during intercontinental ballistic missile accidents, and Soviet or German rocket-fighter projects of World War II. Also not included are alleged unreported Soviet space accidents that are not believed by mainstream historians to have occurred.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Spaceflight fatalities
- (In the statistics below, "astronaut" is applied to all space travellers to avoid the use of "astronaut/cosmonaut".)
 | This article may need to be updated. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information, and remove this template when finished. Please see the talk page for more information. (March 2010) |
The history of space exploration has been marred by a number of tragedies that resulted in the deaths of the astronauts or ground crew. As of 2007[update], in-flight accidents have killed 18 astronauts, training accidents have claimed 11 astronauts, and launchpad accidents have killed at least 71 ground personnel.[dated info]
About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates. Except for the X-15 (which is a suborbital rocket plane), other launchers have not launched sufficiently often for reasonable safety comparisons to be made.
About five percent of the people that have been launched have died doing so (because astronauts often launch more than once). As of November 2004[update], 439 individuals have flown on spaceflights: Russia/Soviet Union (96), USA (277), others (66).[citation needed] Twenty-two have died while in a spacecraft: three on Apollo 1, one on Soyuz 1, one on X-15-3, three on Soyuz 11, seven on Challenger, and seven on Columbia. By space program, 18 NASA astronauts (4.1%) and four Russian cosmonauts (0.9% of all the people launched) died while in a spacecraft.[dated info]
Soyuz accidents have claimed the lives of four. No deaths have occurred on Soyuz missions since 1971, and none with the current design of the Soyuz. Including the early Soyuz design, the average deaths per launched crew member on Soyuz are currently under two percent. However, there have also been several serious injuries, and some other incidents in which crews nearly died.
NASA astronauts who have lost their lives in the line of duty are memorialized at the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Merritt Island, Florida. Cosmonauts who have died in the line of duty under the auspices of the Soviet Union were generally honored by burial at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow. It is unknown whether this remains tradition for Russia, since the Kremlin Wall Necropolis was largely a Communist honor and no cosmonauts have died in action since the Soviet Union fell.
There have been four fatal in-flight accidents on missions which were considered spaceflights under the internationally accepted definition of the term, plus one on the ground during rehearsal of a planned flight. In each case all crew were killed. To date, there has never been an incident where an individual member of a multi-member crew has died during (or while rehearsing) a mission.
- 1967 April 24: parachute failure: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died on board Soyuz 1. His one-day mission had been plagued by a series of mishaps with the new type of spacecraft, which culminated in the capsule's parachute not opening properly after atmospheric reentry. Komarov was killed when the capsule hit the ground at high speed.
- 1971 June 30: crew exposed to vacuum of space: The crew of Soyuz 11, Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov, were killed after undocking from space station Salyut 1 after a three-week stay. A valve on their spacecraft had accidentally opened when the service module separated, which was only discovered when the module was opened by the recovery team. Technically the only fatalities in space (above 100 km).
- 1986 January 28: structural failure after lift-off: The first U.S. multiple in-flight fatalities. The Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after lift-off on STS-51-L. Analysis of the accident showed that a faulty O-ring seal had allowed hot gases from the shuttle solid rocket booster (SRB) to weaken the external propellant tank, and also the strut that held the booster to the tank. The tank aft region failed, causing it to begin disintegrating. The SRB strut also failed, causing the SRB to rotate inward and expedite tank breakup. Challenger was thrown sideways into the Mach 1.8 windstream causing it to break up in midair with the loss of all seven crew members aboard: Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael J. Smith, and Dick Scobee. NASA investigators determined they may have survived during the spacecraft disintegration, while possibly unconscious from hypoxia; at least some of them tried to protect themselves by activating their emergency oxygen. Any survivors of the breakup were killed, however, when the largely intact cockpit hit the water at 200 mph (320 km/h). See Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
- 2003 February 1: structural failure during re-entry: The Space Shuttle Columbia was lost as it reentered after a two-week mission, STS-107. Damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system (TPS) led to structural failure in the shuttle's left wing and, ultimately, the spacecraft broke apart. Investigations after the tragedy revealed the damage to the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge wing panel had resulted from a piece of insulation foam breaking away from the external tank during the launch and hitting shuttle's wing. Rick D. Husband, William McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon were killed. See Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
There has also been a single accident on a flight which was considered a spaceflight by those involved in conducting it, but not under the internationally accepted definition:
- 1967 November 15: control failure: Michael J. Adams died while piloting a North American X-15 rocket plane. Major Adams was a U.S. Air Force pilot in the NASA/USAF X-15 program. During X-15 Flight 191, his seventh flight, the plane first had an electrical problem and then developed control problems at the apogee of its flight. The pilot may also have become disoriented. During reentry from a 266,000 ft (50.4 mile, 81.1 km) apogee, the X-15 yawed sideways out of control and went into a spin at a speed of Mach 5, from which the pilot never recovered. Excessive acceleration led to the X-15 breaking up in flight at about 65,000 feet (19.8 km))[2]. Adams was posthumously awarded astronaut wings as his flight had passed an altitude of 50 miles (80.5 km) (the U.S. definition of space).
[edit] Near-fatalities
Apart from actual disasters, a number of missions resulted in some very near misses and also some training accidents that nearly resulted in deaths. In-flight near misses have included various reentry mishaps (in particular on Soyuz 5), the sinking of the Mercury 4 capsule, and the Voskhod 2 crew spending a night in dense forest surrounded by wolves.
- 1961 April 12: separation failure: During the flight of Vostok 1, after retrofire, the Vostok service module unexpectedly remained attached to the reentry module by a bundle of wires. The two halves of the craft were supposed to separate ten seconds after retrofire. But they did not separate until 10 minutes after retrofire, when the wire bundle finally burned through. The spacecraft had gone through wild gyrations at the beginning of reentry, before the wires burned through and the reentry module settled into the proper reentry attitude.
- 1961 July 21: landing capsule sank in water: After Liberty Bell 7 splashed down in the Atlantic, the hatch malfunctioned and blew, filling the capsule with water and almost drowning Gus Grissom, who managed to escape before it sank. Grissom then had to deal with a spacesuit that was rapidly filling with water, but managed to get into the helicopter's retrieval collar and was lifted to safety.
- 1965 March 18: spacesuit or airlock design fault: Voskhod 2 featured the world's first spacewalk, by Alexei Leonov. After his twelve minutes outside, Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum to the point where he could not reenter the airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, and was barely able to get back inside the capsule after suffering slight effects of the bends.
- 1966 March 17: equipment failure: Gemini 8: A maneuvering thruster refused to shut down and put their capsule into an uncontrolled spin. The g-force became so intense the astronauts were possibly within seconds of blacking out when they regained control.
- 1969 January 18: separation failure: the Soyuz 5 had a harrowing reentry and landing when the capsule's service module initially refused to separate, causing the spacecraft to begin reentry faced the wrong way. The service module broke away before the capsule would have been destroyed, and so it made a rough but survivable landing far off course in the Ural mountains.
- 1970 April 13: equipment failure: In the most celebrated "near miss", the Apollo 13 crew came home safely after a violent rupture of a liquid oxygen tank[3] deprived the Service Module of its ability to produce electrical power, crippling their spacecraft en route to the moon. They survived the loss of use of their command ship by relying on the Lunar Module as a "life boat" to provide life support and power for the trip home.
- 1975 April 5: separation failure: The Soyuz 18a mission nearly ended in disaster when the rocket suffered a second-stage separation failure during launch. This also interrupted the craft's attitude, causing the vehicle to accelerate towards the Earth and triggering an emergency reentry sequence. Due to the downward acceleration, the crew experienced an acceleration of 21.3 g rather than the nominal 15 g for an abort. Upon landing, the vehicle rolled down a hill and stopped just short of a high cliff. The crew survived, but Lazarev, the mission commander, suffered internal injuries due to the severe G-forces and was never able to fly again.
- 1975 July 24: gas poisoning on board: During final descent and parachute deployment for the Apollo Soyuz Test Project Command Module, the U.S. crew were exposed to 300 µL/L of toxic nitrogen tetroxide gas (RCS fuel) venting from the spacecraft and reentering a cabin air intake. A switch was left in the wrong position. 400µL/L is fatal. Vance Brand's heart stopped and was narrowly resuscitated. The crew members suffered from burning sensations of their eyes, faces, noses, throats and lungs. Thomas Stafford quickly broke out emergency oxygen masks and put one on Brand and gave one to Deke Slayton. The crew were exposed to the toxic gas from 24,000 ft (7.3 km) down to landing. About an hour after landing the crew developed chemical-induced pneumonia and their lungs had edema. They experienced shortness of breath and were hospitalized in Hawaii. The crew spent two weeks in the hospital. By July 30, their chest X-rays appeared to return to normal.
- 1976 October 16: landing capsule sank in water: The Soyuz 23 capsule broke through the surface of a frozen lake and was dragged underwater by its parachute. The crew was saved after a very difficult rescue operation.
- 1983 September 26: fire in launch vehicle: A Soyuz crew was saved by their escape system when the rocket that was to carry their Soyuz T-10-1 mission into space caught fire on the launchpad.
- 1985 July 29: STS-51-F: Space Shuttle in-flight engine failure: Five minutes, 45 seconds into ascent, one of three shuttle main engines aboard Challenger shut down prematurely due to a spurious high temperature reading. At about the same time, a second main engine almost shut down from a similar problem, but this was observed and inhibited by a fast acting flight controller. The failed SSME resulted in an Abort To Orbit (ATO) trajectory, whereby the shuttle achieves a lower than planned orbital altitude. Had the second engine failed within about 20 seconds of the first, a Transatlantic Landing (TAL) abort might have been necessary. (No bailout option existed until after mission STS-51-L (Challenger disaster), but even today a bailout—a "contingency abort", would never be considered when an "intact abort" option exists, and after five minutes of normal flight it would always exist unless a serious flight control failure or some other major problem beyond engine shutdown occurred.[4])
- 1988 September 5: sensor failure: Soyuz TM-5 cosmonauts Alexandr Lyakhov and Abdul Ahad Mohmand (from Afghanistan) undocked from Mir. They jettisoned the orbital module and got ready for the deorbit burn. The deorbit burn did not occur because the infrared horizon sensor could not confirm proper attitude. Seven minutes later, the correct attitude was achieved. The main engine fired, but Lyakhov shut it down after 3 seconds to prevent a landing overshoot. A second firing 3 hours later lasted only 6 seconds. Lyakhov immediately attempted to manually deorbit the craft, but the computer shut down the engine after 60 seconds. When they were jettisoning the Equipment Module, which contained, among other things, the primary propulsion system – the very system they needed to deorbit – Mohmand, disregarding a directive to sit back and let Mission Control assess the situation, had scanned the ship's gauges and displays, and discovered that separation was going to take place in less than a minute. Lyakhov quickly disabled the program. Had he not done so, he and Mohmand would have perished, as the Soyuz Descent Module had only enough air and battery power for a couple of hours. After three attempts at retrofire, the cosmonauts were forced to remain in orbit a further day, until they came into alignment with the targeted landing site again. Even if they had enough fuel to do so, they would not have been able to re-dock with Mir, because they had discarded the docking system along with the orbital module. The cosmonauts were left for a day in the cramped quarters of the descent module with minimal food and water and no sanitary facilities. Reentry occurred as normal on September 7, 1988.
- 1997 February 23: fire onboard: There was a fire on board the Mir space station when a lithium perchlorate canister used to generate oxygen leaked. The fire was extinguished after about 90 seconds, but smoke did not clear for several minutes.
- 1997 June 25: collision in space: At Mir during a re-docking test with the Progress-M 34 cargo freighter, the Progress freighter collided with the Spektr module and solar arrays of the Mir space station. This damaged the solar arrays and the collision punctured a hole in the Spektr module and the space station began depressurizing. The on-board crew of two Russians and one visiting NASA astronaut were able to close off the Spektr module from the rest of Mir after quickly cutting cables and hoses blocking hatch closure.
- 1999 July 23: STS-93: main engine electrical short and hydrogen leak: Five seconds after liftoff, an electrical short knocked out controllers for two shuttle main engines. The engines automatically switched to their backup controllers. Had a further short shut down two engines, Columbia would have ditched in the ocean, although the crew could have possibly bailed out. Concurrently a pin came loose inside one engine and ruptured a cooling line, allowing a hydrogen fuel leak. This caused premature fuel exhaustion, but the vehicle safely achieved a slightly lower orbit. Had the failure propagated further, a risky transatlantic or RTLS abort would have been required.
- 2008 April 19: Soyuz TMA-11 suffered a reentry mishap similar to that suffered by Soyuz 5 in 1969; the service module failed to completely separate from the reentry vehicle and caused it to face the wrong way during the early portion of aerobraking. As with Soyuz 5, the service module eventually separated and the reentry vehicle completed a rough but survivable landing. Following the Russian news agency Interfax's report, this was widely reported as life-threatening[5][6] while NASA urged caution pending an investigation of the vehicle.[7]
- On one Shuttle flight[which?], wiring faults threatened to prevent the main tank from separating.
- The very first Shuttle flight, STS-1, suffered significant losses of thermal protection tiles, which could have caused a Columbia-type atmospheric reentry disaster. Fortunately none of them were in a sufficiently critical area. On the same flight a different thermal protection breach allowed hot gas to weaken a landing gear strut, which buckled on landing.
[edit] Training accidents
 | It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article titled Spaceflight training accidents. (Discuss) |
In addition to accidents during spaceflights, astronauts have experienced accidents during training.
- 1961 March 23: fire on board: First space-related casualty. Valentin Bondarenko was in training in a special low-pressure chamber with a pure oxygen atmosphere. He threw an alcohol-soaked cloth onto an electric hotplate. In the pure oxygen environment, the fire quickly engulfed the entire chamber. Bondarenko suffered third-degree burns over most of his body and was barely alive when the chamber was opened, and died of his burns shortly after being hospitalized. Bondarenko's death was covered up by the Soviet government; word of his death only reached the West in 1986. Many materials become explosively flammable when exposed to oxygen with a higher partial pressure than that of air at STP; modern spacecraft use mixtures of continuously replaced oxygen and nitrogen. It has been speculated that knowledge of Bondarenko's death might have led to changes that would have prevented the Apollo 1 fire.
- 1964 October 31: bird strike: Theodore Freeman was killed when a goose smashed through the cockpit canopy of his T-38 jet trainer. Flying shards of Plexiglas entered the engine intake and caused the engine to flame out. Freeman ejected from the stricken aircraft, but was too close to the ground for his parachute to open properly. The creation of zero-zero ejection seats has eliminated this problem. (However, T-38s remaining in service still do not have a zero-zero ejection seat.)
- 1966 February 28: crash on landing: The original Gemini 9 crew, Elliot See and Charles Bassett, were killed while attempting to land their T-38 in bad weather. See misjudged his approach and crashed into the McDonnell aircraft factory.
- 1967 January 27: fire on board: A fire in the cabin claimed the lives of the Apollo 1 crew as they rehearsed the launch sequence for their planned February 21 launch. An electrical fault sparked the blaze that spread quickly in a pure oxygen atmosphere, killing Gus Grissom, Edward White II, and Roger Chaffee.
- 1967 October 5: controls failed: Clifton "C.C." Williams died after a mechanical failure caused the controls of his T-38 to stop responding. He had been assigned to the back-up crew for what would be the Apollo 9 mission and would have most likely been assigned as Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 12. The Apollo 12 mission patch has four stars on it: one each for the three astronauts who flew the mission and one for Williams.
- 1967 December 8: plane crash: Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr. was named the first African-American astronaut for the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory program, but he never made it into space. He died when his F-104 Starfighter jet crashed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
- 1968 March 27: plane crash: First human in space Yuri Gagarin died when his MiG-15 jet trainer crashed while he prepared for the Soyuz 3 mission. An official report at the time blamed either birdstrike or that he turned too fast to avoid something in the air. But in 2003 it came to light that the KGB had found that the official report was false and that the truth was negligence by an air force colonel on the ground, who gave an out-of-date weather report; the flight needed good weather and the aircraft not to have external extra fuel tanks, but the cloud base was nearly at ground level and the aircraft had external fuel tanks under its wings. Since Gagarin was a very public figure, the Soviet government decided that it would be bad publicity to have him killed in a mere training accident and so several newspapers printed the report that he actually died heroically testing a top-secret prototype. This again led to speculation amongst Western conspiracy-proponents as to whether Gagarin had instead died in hushed-up spacecraft accident (see Lost cosmonauts, conspiracy theory)
- Three of the five Lunar Landing Research and Training vehicles (LLRV and LLTV) were destroyed in crashes near Houston, Texas:
- 1968 May 6: LLRV No. 1 crashed at Ellington AFB, Texas; Neil Armstrong (pilot) ejected safely.
- 1968 December 8: LLTV No. 1 crashed at Ellington AFB, Texas. MSC test pilot Joseph Algranti ejected safely.
- 1971 January 29: An LLTV crashed at Ellington AFB, Texas. NASA test pilot Stuart Present ejected safely.
- 1971 January 23: helicopter crash: Eugene Cernan was flying a helicopter as part of his Lunar Module training as Backup Commander for Apollo 14. The helicopter crashed into the Banana River at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Cernan nearly drowned because he was not wearing a life vest and received some second-degree burns on his face and singed hair. According to official reports at the time, the crash was the result of mechanical failure. Later accounts, written by Cernan himself in an autobiography, admit he was flying too low and showing off for nearby boaters. The helicopter dipped a skid into the water and crashed. James McDivitt, an Apollo Manager at the time, demanded that Cernan be removed from flight status and not be given Command of Apollo 17. Cernan was defended by Deke Slayton and given the Apollo 17 command. James McDivitt resigned as an Apollo Manager shortly after the Apollo 16 mission.[8]
[edit] Fatal accidents with ground crew and civilian fatalities
| | It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article titled Spaceflight ground support fatalities. (Discuss) |
| | The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (March 2010) |
Date | Place | Death(s) | Kind of disaster |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 17, 1930 | Berlin, Germany | 1 | Max Valier killed by rocket engine explosion |
| October 10, 1933 | Germany | 3 | Explosion in rocket manufacturing room of Tiling |
| July 16, 1934 | Kummersdorf, Germany | 3 | Ground test engine explosion |
| 1944? | Tuchola Forest, German-occupied Poland | 7 | An A4-rocket crashes at a test launch in a trench. Several soldiers who were in the trench were killed. |
| 1945 | Grabów nad Prosną, German-occupied Poland | 2 | A test V-2 rocket fired from Wierzchucin crashed on the house in the village of Dzięcioły, near Grabów nad Prosną, killing two people inside - Władysława and Franciszek Desek, and injuring their two children. |
| Oct 24, 1960 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 120? | The Nedelin catastrophe |
| April 14, 1964 | Cape Canaveral, USA | 3 | Delta rocket ignited in assembly room, killing 3 technicians and injuring 9 others. The ignition was caused by a spark of static electricity |
| May 7, 1964 | Braunlage, West Germany | 3 | Mail rocket built by Gerhard Zucker exploded and debris hit crowd of spectators |
| June 26, 1973 | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, USSR | 9 | Launch explosion of Kosmos-3M rocket |
| March 18, 1980 | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, USSR | 48 | Explosion while fueling up a Vostok-2M rocket |
| March 19, 1981 | Cape Canaveral, USA | 2 | Anoxia while in the aft engine compartment of Columbia during preparations for STS-1[9] |
| January 26, 1995 | Xichang, China | 6+ | Long March rocket veered off course after launch [2] |
| May 5, 1995 | Guiana Space Centre, French Guyana | 2 | Anoxia; Luc Celle and Jean-Claude Dhainaut died during an inspection in the umbilical mast of the launchpad |
| February 15, 1996 | Xichang, China | 56-200 | Intelsat 708 Satellite. Long March rocket veered off course 2 seconds after launch, crashing in the nearby village and destroying 80 houses, according to the official Chinese count, killing 56 people, but with U.S. defense intelligence officials estimating 200 dead.[citation needed] |
| October 1, 2001 | Cape Canaveral, USA | 1 | Crane operator Bill Brooks was killed in an industrial accident at Launch Complex 37 |
| October 15, 2002 | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia | 1 | A Soyuz-U exploded 29 seconds after launch, killing a soldier, Ivan Marchenko, and injuring 8 others. Fragments of the rocket started a forest fire nearby, and a Block D strap-on booster caused damage to the launchpad |
| August 22, 2003 | Alcântara, Brazil | 21 | Explosion of an unmanned rocket during launch preparations (see Brazilian rocket explosion) |
| July 26, 2007 | Mojave Spaceport, California | 3 | Explosion during a test of rocket systems by Scaled Composites during a nitrous oxide injector test[10] |
[edit] See also
- Space burial — Space disasters
- Space exposure
- Fallen Astronaut
- Lost cosmonauts
- Lost Chinese astronaut of 1978/79
- Rumored Nazi pilots of A9
- Criticism of the Space Shuttle program
- Conspiracy theory
- International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety
- Space shuttle
[edit] References
 | This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (September 2009) |
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2008) |
- ^ [1]
- ^ Check-Six.com - The Crash of X-15A-3
- ^ NASA's official report (REPORT OF APOLLO 13 REVIEW BOARD) does not use the word "explosion" in describing the tank failure. Rupture disks and other safety measures were present to prevent a catastrophic explosion, and analysis of pressure readings and subsequent ground-testing determined that these safety measures worked as designed. See findings 26 and 27 on page 195 (5-22) of the NASA report.
- ^ http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/sts_mes.html#mes_ascent
- ^ Russia probes Soyuz capsule's perilous re-entry, CNN', April 23, 2008
- ^ Eckel, Mike, Russian news agency says Soyuz crew was in danger on descent, Associated Press, April 23, 2008
- ^ Morring, Frank, NASA Urges Caution On Soyuz Reports, Aviation Week & Space Technology, April 23, 2008
- ^ Check-Six.com - The 1971 Crash of Gene Cernan's Helo
- ^ NASA - 1981 KSC Chronology Part 1 - pages 84, 85, 100; Part 2 - pages 181, 194, 195,
- ^ Walker, Peter, "Three die in Branson's space tourism tests", Guardian Unlimited, July 27, 2007
[edit] External links
- The Encyclopedia Astronautica
- Manned space programs accident/incident summaries (1963 - 1969) - NASA report (PDF format)
- The Crash Site of the X-15A-3
- Manned space programs accident/incident summaries (1970 - 1971) - NASA report (PDF format)
- Interactive Space Shuttle Disaster Memorial
- Raw Video Reconstruction of Space Shuttle Columbia Re-entry and More
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Moon landing conspiracy theories
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Different Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo Project and the associated Moon landings were falsifications staged by NASA and members of other organizations. Since the conclusion of the Apollo program, a number of related accounts espousing a belief that the landings were faked in some fashion have been advanced by various groups and individuals. Some of the more notable of these various claims include allegations that the Apollo astronauts did not set foot on the Moon; instead NASA and others intentionally deceived the public into believing the landings did occur by manufacturing, destroying, or tampering with evidence, including photos, telemetry tapes, transmissions, and rock samples. Such claims are common to most of the conspiracy theories.
There is abundant third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings, and commentators have published detailed rebuttals to the hoax claims.[1] Various polls have shown that 6% to 28% of the people surveyed in various locations do not think the Moon landing happened.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Origins and history
The first book dedicated to the subject, Bill Kaysing's self-published We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, was released in 1974, two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ceased. Folklorist Linda Degh suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams's 1978 film Capricorn One, which depicts a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a boost to the hoax theory's popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. She notes that this occurred during the post-Watergate era, when segments of the American public were inclined to distrust official accounts. Degh writes: "The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance."[2] In A Man on the Moon, published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8's lunar-orbit mission in December 1968 similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation.
[edit] Public opinion
There are subcultures worldwide which advocate the belief that the Moon landings were faked. James Oberg of ABC News stated that claims made that the Moon landings were faked are actively taught in Cuban schools and wherever Cuban teachers are sent.[3][4] A 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of the American public doubted that the Moon landings had occurred and that 5% had no opinion on the subject,[5][6][7][8] which roughly matches the findings of a similar 1995 Time/CNN poll.[5] Officials of Fox television stated that such skepticism increased to about 20% after the February 15, 2001 airing of that network's TV show entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? Seen by approximately 15 million viewers,[6] the 2001 Fox special is viewed as having promoted the hoax claims.[9][10]
A 2000 poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Fund found that 28% do not believe that American astronauts have been on the Moon, and this percentage is roughly equal in all social-demographic groups.[11] In 2009, a poll conducted by the British Engineering & Technology magazine found that 25% of Britons do not believe that humans have walked on the Moon.[12] Similarly, 25% of Americans between the age of 18 and 25 are not sure the landings happened.[13]
[edit] Predominant hoax claims
A number of different hoax claims have been advanced that involve conspiracy theories outlining concerted action by NASA employees and sometimes others, to perpetuate false information about landings that never occurred, or to cover up accurate information about the landings that occurred in a different manner than have been publicized. Believers have focused on perceived gaps or inconsistencies in the historical record of the missions. The Flat Earth Society was one of the first organizations to accuse NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship and based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.[14]
The most predominant idea is that the entire human landing program was a complete hoax from start to finish. Some claim that the technology to send men to the Moon was insufficient or that the Van Allen radiation belts, solar flares, solar wind, coronal mass ejections and cosmic rays made such a trip impossible.[15]
Bart Sibrel has claimed that the crew of Apollo 11 and subsequent astronauts had faked their orbit around the Moon and their walk on its surface by trick photography and that they never got more than halfway to the Moon. A subset of this proposal is advocated by those who concede the existence of retroreflectors and other observable human-made objects on the Moon. British publisher Marcus Allen represented this argument when he said "I would be the first to accept what [telescope images of the landing site] find as powerful evidence that something was placed on the Moon by man". He goes on to say that photographs of the lander would not prove that America put men on the Moon. "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959, the big problem is getting people there". He suggests that NASA sent robot missions because radiation levels in space would be lethal to humans. Another variant on this is the idea that NASA and its contractors did not recover quickly enough from the Apollo 1 fire, and so all the early Apollo missions were faked, with Apollo 14 or 15 being the first authentic mission.[16]
Philippe Lheureux, French author of Moon Landings: Did NASA Lie ? and Lumières sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon): La NASA a-t-elle menti ?, said that astronauts did land on the Moon but in order to prevent other nations from benefiting from scientific information in the real photos, NASA published fake images.[17]
[edit] Motives
Proponents of the view that the Moon landings were faked give several differing theories about the motivation for the U.S. government to fake the Moon landings. Cold War prestige, monetary gain and providing a distraction are some of the more notable motives which are given.
The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the Space Race against the Soviet Union. Going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by John F. Kennedy famously stating that the U.S. chose to go because it was hard.[18] Proponents also claim that the U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction from the Vietnam War; and so lunar activities suddenly stopped, with planned missions canceled, around the same time that the U.S. ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.[19]
Bill Kaysing maintains that, despite close monitoring by the Soviet Union, it would have been easier for the U.S. to fake the Moon landing, thereby guaranteeing success, than for the U.S. to actually go there. Kaysing claimed that the chance of a successful landing on the Moon was calculated to be 0.017%.[20] NASA raised approximately US$ 30 billion in order to go to the Moon as well, and Kaysing claims that this amount could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity.[21] The issue of delivering on the promise is often brought up as well. Since most proponents believe that the technical issues involved in getting people to the Moon either were insurmountable at the time or remain insurmountable, the Moon landings had to be faked in order to fulfill President Kennedy's 1961 promise "to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."[18]
Others have made the claim that, with all the known and unknown hazards of traveling into deep space,[22] NASA would not have risked the public humiliation of astronauts crashing to their deaths on the lunar surface, broadcast on live TV. So, with time running out, instead of risking a national fiasco and embarrassment and a cut-off of funding of billions of dollars should some catastrophe happen, it's argued that NASA had to stage and fake the moon landing to avoid such a major risk.[23]
[edit] Involvement of the Soviet Union
A primary reason for the race to the Moon was the Cold War. Philip Plait states in Bad Astronomy that the Soviets, with their own competing Moon program and a formidable scientific community able to analyze NASA data, could be expected to have cried foul if the United States tried to fake a Moon landing,[24] especially since their own program had failed. Successfully pointing out a hoax would have been a major propaganda coup. Bart Sibrel has responded, "the Soviets did not have the capability to track deep spacecraft until late in 1972, immediately after which, the last three Apollo missions were abruptly canceled."[25]
[edit] Hoax proponents and their proposals
- Bill Kaysing (1922–2005) an ex-employee of Rocketdyne,[26] the company which built the F-1 engines used on the Saturn V rocket. Kaysing was not technically qualified, and worked at Rocketdyne as a librarian. Kaysing's self published book, We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle,[15][27] made many allegations, effectively beginning the discussion of the Moon landings possibly being hoaxed. NASA and others have debunked the claims made in the book.
- Bart Sibrel, a filmmaker, produced and directed four films for his company AFTH,[28] including a film in 2001 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon,[29] examining the evidence of a hoax. The arguments that Sibrel puts forward in this film have been debunked by numerous sources, including Svector's video series Lunar Legacy,[30] which disproves the documentary's primary argument that the Apollo crew faked their distance from the Earth command module, while in low orbit.
Sibrel has stated that the effect on the shot covered in his film was produced through the use of a transparency of the Earth. Some parts of the original footage, according to Sibrel, were not able to be included on the official releases for the media. On such allegedly censored parts, the correlation between Earth and Moon Phases can be clearly confirmed, refuting Sibrel's claim that these shots were faked. Sibrel was also punched in the face by Buzz Aldrin after Sibrel confronted Aldrin with his theories about the moon hoax[31] while accusing the former astronaut of being "a coward, and a liar, and a thief". Sibrel attempted to press charges against Aldrin but the case was thrown out of court when the judge ruled that Aldrin was within his rights given Sibrel's invasive and aggressive behavior.[32]
- William L. Brian, a nuclear engineer who self-published a book in 1982 called Moongate: Suppressed Findings of the U.S. Space Program, in which he disputes the Moon's surface gravity.
- David Percy, TV producer and expert in audiovisual technologies and member of the Royal Photographic Society, is co-author, along with Mary Bennett of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers (ISBN 1-898541-10-8) and co-producer of What Happened On the Moon ?. He is the main proponent of the "whistle-blower" accusation, arguing that the errors in the NASA photos in particular are so obvious that they are evidence that insiders are trying to 'blow the whistle' on the hoax by deliberately inserting errors that they know will be seen.[33]
- Ralph Rene - An inventor and 'self taught' engineering buff. Author of NASA Mooned America (second edition OCLC 36317224).
- Charles T. Hawkins - Author of How America Faked the Moon Landings,
- James M. Collier (d. 1998) - American journalist and author, producer of the video Was It Only a Paper Moon ? in 1997.
- Jack White - American photo historian known for his attempt to prove forgery in photos related to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
- Marcus Allen - British publisher of Nexus who said that photographs of the lander would not prove that the U.S. put men on the Moon. "Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem - the Russians did that in 1959 - the big problem is getting people there".[34] the 2001 Digital Video Underground Festival in San Francisco. He received a Golden Cine Eagle and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ranen states in Did We Go ? "at this point right now I'm about 75% believing we went". On July 20, 2009, Ranen appeared on Geraldo at Large to argue that no one has landed on the moon.
- Clyde Lewis - Radio talk show host.[35]
- David Groves - Works for Quantech Image Processing and worked on some of the NASA photos. Notably he has examined the photo of Aldrin emerging from the LM. He said he can pinpoint the exact point at which an artificial light was used. Using the focal length of the camera's lens and an actual boot, he has calculated, using ray-tracing, that the artificial light source is between 24 to 36 centimetres (9.4 to 14 in) to the right of the camera.[36] This corresponds with the sunlit part of Armstrong's spacesuit.[37]
- Yuri Mukhin - Russian opposition politician, publicist and writer and author of the book The Moon affair of the USA (2006) in which he denies all Moon landing evidence and accuses the U.S. establishment of plundering the money paid by the American taxpayers for the Moon program and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and some Soviet scientists for helping NASA commit the hoax without being denounced.[38]
- Alexander Popov - Russian doctor of physical-mathematical sciences and author of the book Americans on the Moon - a great breakthrough or a space affair ? (Moscow, 2009, ISBN 978-5-9533-3315-3) in which he aims to prove that Saturn V was in fact a camouflaged Saturn 1B[39] and denies all Moon landing evidence.[40]
- Stanislav Pokrovsky - Russian candidate of technical sciences and General Director of a scientific-manufacturing enterprise Project-D-MSK who calculated that the real speed of the Saturn V rocket at S-IC staging time was only half of what was declared. His analysis appears to assume that the solid rocket plumes from the fusellage and retro rockets on the two stages came to an instant halt in the surrounding air so they can be used to estimate the velocity of the rocket. He ignored high altitude winds and the altitude at staging, 67 km, where air is about 1/10,000 as dense as at sea level, and claimed that only a loop around the Moon was possible, not a manned landing on the Moon with return to the Earth. He also determined the reason for this - problems with the Inconel superalloy used in the F-1 engine.[41][42][43]
[edit] Critical examination of hoax accusations
According to James Longuski, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering at Purdue University, the size and complexity of the alleged conspiracy theory scenarios make their veracity an impossibility. More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, and a dozen men who walked on the Moon returned to Earth to recount their experiences. Hundreds of thousands of people, including astronauts, scientists, engineers, technicians, and skilled laborers, would have had to keep the secret. Longuski also contends that it would have been significantly easier to actually land on the Moon than to generate such a massive conspiracy to fake such a landing.[44][45]
Vince Calder and Andrew Johnson provided a detailed rebuttal to the conspiracy theorists' claims, in a question and answer format, on the Argonne National Laboratory web site.[46] They show that NASA's portrayal of the Moon landing is fundamentally accurate, allowing for such common errors as mislabeled photos and imperfect personal recollections. Through application of the scientific process, any hypothesis that is contradicted by the observable facts may be rejected. The lack of narrative consistency in the hoax hypothesis occurs because hoax accounts vary from proponent to proponent. The 'real landing' hypothesis is a single story, since it comes from a single source, but there are many hoax hypotheses, each of which addresses a specific aspect of the Moon landing, and this variation is considered a key indicator that the hoax hypothesis actually constitutes a conspiracy theory.[47]
Many astronauts of the Apollo era have observed that the "hoax" stance has never been officially taken by Russia or members of its space program.[citation needed] Given the importance of the space race during the years leading to the first moon landing, this is usually received as one of the clearest and most significant rejections of hoax theories.
[edit] Imaging the landing sites
Another component of the Moon hoax theory is based on the argument that professional observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. The argument runs that if telescopes can "see to the edge of the universe" then they ought to be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites, implying that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the Moon landing hoax by refusing to take pictures of the landing sites. Images of the moon have been taken by Hubble, including at least two Apollo landing sites; but the Hubble resolution limits viewing of lunar objects to sizes no smaller than 60-75 yards (55–69 meters), which is insufficient to see any landing site features.[48] In 2009 NASA released pictures from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter clearly showing the Apollo landing sites.
Leonard David published an article on space.com,[49][50] on April 27, 2001 which displayed a picture taken by the Clementine mission showing a diffuse dark spot at the location that NASA says is the Apollo 15 Lunar Module Falcon. The evidence was noticed by Misha Kreslavsky, of the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and Yuri Shkuratov of the Kharkov Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine. The European Space Agency's SMART-1 unmanned probe sent back imagery of the Apollo Moon landing sites, according to Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program.[51] "Given SMART-1's initial high orbit, however, it may prove difficult to see artifacts", said Foing in an interview on space.com.
The Daily Telegraph (London) published a story in 2002 saying that European astronomers at the Very Large Telescope would use it to view the remains of the Apollo lunar landers. According to the article, Dr Richard West said that his team would take "a high-resolution image of one of the Apollo landing sites". Marcus Allen, a Moon hoax proponent, pointed out in the story that no images of hardware on the Moon would convince him that manned landings had taken place.[52] As the VLT is capable of resolving equivalent to the distance between the headlights of a car as seen from the Moon,[53] it may be able to directly image some features of the Apollo landing site. Such photos, if and when they become available, would be the first non-NASA produced images of the site at that definition.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched their SELENE lunar orbiter on September 14, 2007 (JST) from Tanegashima Space Center. SELENE orbited the Moon at about 100 kilometres (62 mi) altitude. In May 2008 JAXA reported detecting the "halo" generated by the Apollo 15 lunar module engine exhaust from a Terrain Camera image.[54] A 3-D reconstructed photo also matched the terrain of an Apollo 15 photograph taken from the surface.
On July 17, 2009 NASA released low-resolution engineering test photographs of the Apollo 11, Apollo 14, Apollo 15, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 landing sites that have been imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as part of the process of starting its primary mission.[56] The photographs show the descent stage of the lunar module from each mission on the surface of the Moon. The picture of the Apollo 14 landing site also shows tracks created by an astronaut between a science experiment (ALSEP) and the lunar lander.[57] Photographs of the Apollo 12 landing site were released by NASA on September 3, 2009.[58] The Intrepid lunar module descent stage, experiment package (ALSEP), Surveyor 3 spacecraft, and astronaut footpaths are all visible.
While the LRO images have been enjoyed by the scientific community as a whole, they have not done anything to convince conspiracy theorists that the landings took place.[59] The main reason for this doubt is because the LRO is a NASA project, and is therefore assumed to be biased.
[edit] Academic work
In 2004, Martin Hendry and Ken Skeldon of the University of Glasgow were awarded a grant by the UK based Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in order to investigate 'Moon Hoax' proposals.[60] In November 2004, they gave a lecture at the Glasgow Science Centre where the top ten lines of evidence advanced by hoax proponents were individually addressed and refuted.[61]
Alex R. Blackwell, of the University of Hawaii has pointed out that photos taken by Apollo astronauts[49] are currently the best available images of the landing sites; they show shadows of the lander, but not the lander itself.
[edit] MythBusters special
An episode of MythBusters in August 2008 was dedicated to NASA, and each myth addressed during the show was related to the Moon landings, such as the pictures and video footage. A few members of the MythBusters crew were allowed into a NASA training facility to test some of the myths. All of the hoax-related myths examined on the show were labeled as having been "Busted".
[edit] Missing data
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Blueprints and design and development drawings of the machines involved are missing.[62][63] Apollo 11 data tapes containing telemetry and the high quality video (before scan conversion) of the first moonwalk are missing.
[edit] Tapes
Dr. David Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Eugene F. Kranz both acknowledged that the Apollo 11 telemetry data tapes are missing. Hoax proponents interpret this as support for the case that they never existed.[64] The Apollo 11 telemetry tapes were different from the telemetry tapes of the other Moon landings because they contained the raw television broadcast. For technical reasons, the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM) carried a slow-scan television (SSTV) camera (see Apollo TV camera). In order to be broadcast to regular television, a scan conversion has to be done. The radio telescope at Parkes Observatory in Australia was in position to receive the telemetry from the Moon at the time of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk.[65] Parkes had a larger antenna than NASA's antenna in Australia at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, so it received a better picture. It also received a better picture than NASA's antenna at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. This direct TV signal, along with telemetry data, was recorded onto one-inch fourteen-track analog tape there. A crude, real-time scan conversion of the SSTV signal was done in Australia before it was broadcast around the world. The original SSTV transmission had better detail and contrast than the scan-converted pictures.[66] It is this tape, that was recorded in Australia, before the scan conversion, which is missing. Tapes or films of the scan-converted pictures exist and are available. Still photographs of the original SSTV image are available (see photos). About fifteen minutes of the SSTV images of the Apollo 11 moonwalk were filmed by an amateur 8 mm film camera, and these are also available. Later Apollo missions did not use SSTV, and their video is also available. At least some of the telemetry tapes from the ALSEP scientific experiments left on the Moon (which ran until 1977) still exist, according to Dr. Williams. Copies of those tapes have been found.[67]
Others are looking for the missing telemetry tapes, but for different reasons. The tapes contain the original and highest quality video feed from the Apollo 11 lunar landing which a number of former Apollo personnel want to recover for posterity, while NASA engineers looking towards future moon missions believe the Apollo telemetry data may be useful for their design studies. Their investigations have determined that the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the U.S. National Archives in 1970, but by 1984 all the Apollo 11 tapes had been returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center at their request. The tapes are believed to have been stored rather than re-used, and efforts to determine where they were stored are ongoing.[68] Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967,[69] even before the lunar landings.
On November 1, 2006 Cosmos Magazine reported that some one-hundred data tapes recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission had been discovered in a small marine science laboratory in the main physics building at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. One of the old tapes has been sent to NASA for analysis. The slow-scan television images were not on the tape.[70] Britain's Sunday Express reported in late June 2009 that the missing tapes were found in storage facility in the basement of a building on a university campus in Perth, Australia.
On July 16, 2009, NASA indicated that it must have erased the original Apollo 11 Moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the tape. On December 22, 2009 NASA issued a final report on the Apollo 11 telemetry tapes [71] Senior engineer Dick Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back during the Apollo missions, is now in charge of the restoration project. After an extensive three-year search, an "inescapable conclusion" was that approximately 45 tapes (estimated 15 tapes recorded at each of the three tracking stations) of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused, said Nafzger.[72] In time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Lowry Digital of Burbank, California has been tasked with restoring the surviving footage. President of Lowry Digital Mike Inchalik stated that, "this is by far and away the lowest quality" video the company has previously dealt with. Nafzger praised Lowry for restoring "crispness" to the Apollo video, which will remain in black and white and contain conservative digital enhancements. The $230,000 restoration project that will take months to complete will not include sound quality improvements. Some selections of restored footage in high definition have been made available on the NASA website.[73]
[edit] Blueprints
The website Xenophilia.com documents a hoax claim that blueprints for the Apollo Lunar Module, Lunar rover, and associated equipment are missing.[74] There are some diagrams of the Lunar Module and Lunar rover on the NASA web site as well as on Xenophilia.com.[74] Grumman appears to have destroyed most of their documentation,[75][76] but copies of the blueprints for the Saturn V exist on microfilm.[77]
An unused LM is on exhibit at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.[78][79] The Lunar Module designated LM-13 would have landed on the Moon during the Apollo 18 mission, but was instead put into storage when the mission was canceled: it has since been restored and put on display. Other unused Lunar Modules are on display: LM-2 at the National Air and Space Museum and LM-9 at Kennedy Space Center.[80]
Four mission-worthy Lunar Rovers were built. Three of them were carried to the Moon on Apollo 15, 16, and 17, and left there. After Apollo 18 was canceled (see Canceled Apollo missions), the other lunar rover was used for spare parts for the Apollo 15 to 17 missions. The only lunar rovers on display are test vehicles, trainers, and models.[81] The "Moon buggies" were built by Boeing.[82] The 221-page operation manual for the Lunar Rover contains some detailed drawings,[83] although not the design blueprints.
An original Saturn V rocket is currently on display at the USA Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.[84] The rockets components as are on public display as well, as is much of the original equipment used in the Apollo missions.
[edit] Technology
At the time that the Apollo Program occurred, Bart Sibrel claims that the Soviet Union had five times more manned hours in space than the United States, and that they had put the first man-made satellite in orbit (October 1957, Sputnik 1);[Note 1] the first living creature to enter orbit, a female dog named Laika, (November 1957, Sputnik 2), the first to safely return living creature from orbit, two dogs Belka and Strelka, 40 mice, 2 rats (August 1960, Sputnik 5); the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, also the first man to orbit the Earth (April 1961, Vostok 1); the first to have two spacecraft in orbit at the same time [though it was not a space rendezvous, as frequently described] (August 1962, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4); the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova (June 1963, Vostok 6, as part of a second dual-spacecraft flight including Vostok 5); the first crew of three cosmonauts on board one spacecraft (October 1964, Voskhod 1); and the first spacewalk (EVA) (March 1965, Voskhod 2).
On January 27, 1967, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 1 died in a fire on the launch pad during training. The fire was triggered by a spark in the oxygen-rich atmosphere used in the spacecraft test, and fueled by a significant quantity of combustible material within the spacecraft. Two years later all of the problems were declared fixed. Bart Sibrel believes that the accident led NASA to conclude that the only way to win the Moon race was to fake the landings.[citation needed] In any case, the first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, occurred in October 1968, 21 months after the fire.
Before the first manned Earth-orbiting Apollo flight (Apollo 7), the USSR had made nine spaceflights (seven with one cosmonaut, one with two, one with three). The U.S. had made sixteen flights (six with one astronaut, ten with two). The USSR and U.S. each had six spaceflights in 1961-63, each with one astronaut or cosmonaut. The USSR had only three spaceflights in 1964-67 (each only a little longer than one day) whereas the U.S. had ten in this period (averaging over four days each). In terms of spacecraft hours, the USSR had 460 hours of space flight; the U.S. had 1,024 hours. In terms of astronaut/cosmonaut time, the USSR had accumulated 534 hours of manned spaceflight whereas the U.S. had accumulated 1,992 hours. By the time of Apollo 11, the United States's lead was much wider than that. (See List of human spaceflights, 1960s.)
NASA and others say that these achievements by the Soviets are not as impressive as the simple list implies; that a number of these firsts were mere stunts that did not advance the technology significantly, or at all (e.g. the first woman in space).[85]
A close examination of the many flight missions reveal many problems, risks, and near-catastrophes for both the Soviet and American programs. A negative first for the Soviets was the first in-flight fatality, in April 1967, three months after the Apollo I fire, as Soyuz 1 crash-landed. Despite that disaster, the Soyuz program continued, after a lengthy interval to solve design problems, as with the Apollo program.
Most of the Soviet accomplishments listed above were matched by the U.S. within a year, and occasionally within weeks. In 1965 the U.S. started to achieve many firsts which were important steps in a mission to the Moon. See List of space exploration milestones, 1957-1969 for a more complete list of achievements by both the U.S. and USSR. The USSR never developed a successful rocket capable of a Moon landing mission — their N1 rocket failed on all four launch attempts. They never tested a lunar lander on a manned mission.[86]
[edit] Photographs and films
Moon hoax proponents devote a substantial portion of their efforts to examining NASA photos. They point to various oddities of photographs and films purportedly taken on the Moon. Experts in photography (even those unrelated to NASA) respond that the anomalies, while sometimes counter-intuitive, are in fact precisely what one would expect from a real Moon landing, and contrary to what would occur with manipulated or studio imagery. Hoax proponents also state that whistleblowers may have deliberately manipulated the NASA photos in hope of exposing NASA.
1. Crosshairs appear to be behind objects.
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- Overexposure causes white objects to bleed into the black areas on the film.
2. Crosshairs are sometimes misplaced or rotated.
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- Popular versions of photos are sometimes cropped or rotated for aesthetic impact.
3. The quality of the photographs is implausibly high.
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- There are many poor quality photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts. NASA chose to publish only the best examples.[87][88]
- The Apollo astronauts used high resolution Hasselblad 500 EL Data cameras with Carl Zeiss optics and a 70-mm film magazine.[89]
4. There are no stars in any of the photos; the Apollo 11 astronauts also claimed in a post-mission press conference to not remember seeing any stars.
-
- The astronauts were talking specifically about naked-eye observations of stars during the daytime. They regularly sighted stars through the spacecraft navigation optics while aligning their inertial reference platforms.
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- The sun was shining. Cameras were set for daylight exposure, and could not detect the faint points of light.[90] Even the brightest stars are dim and difficult to see in the daytime on the Moon. Neil Armstrong said that he could not see stars on the daylight side of the Moon with his naked eyes.[91] Edwin Aldrin saw no stars from the Moon [92] Harrison Schmitt saw no stars from the Moon.[93] The astronauts' eyes were adapted to the brightly sunlit landscape around them so that they could not see the relatively faint stars. Camera settings can turn a well-lit background into ink-black when the foreground object is brightly lit, forcing the camera to increase shutter speed in order not to have the foreground light completely wash out the image. A demonstration of this effect is here. The effect is similar to not being able to see stars outside when in a brightly-lit room - the stars only become visible when the light is turned off. The astronauts could see stars with the naked eye only when they were in the shadow of the Moon. All of the landings were in daylight.[94]
-
- An ultraviolet telescope was taken to the lunar surface on Apollo 16 and operated in the shadow of the lunar module. (It is seen in the background of the pictures showing JohnYoung's jump salutes of the US flag.) It captured pictures of the earth and of many stars, some of which are dim in visible light but bright in the ultraviolet. These observations were later matched up with observations taken by orbiting ultraviolet telescopes. Furthermore, the positions of those stars with respect to the earth are correct for the time and location of the Apollo 16 photographs.
5. The color and angle of shadows and light are inconsistent.
-
- Shadows on the Moon are complicated by uneven ground, wide angle lens distortion, light reflected from the Earth, and lunar dust.[96] Shadows also display the properties of vanishing point perspective leading them to converge to a point on the horizon.
- This theory was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".
6. Identical backgrounds in photos which, according to their captions, were taken miles apart.
7. The number of photographs taken is implausibly high. Up to one photo per 50 seconds.[99]
-
- Simplified gear with fixed settings permitted two photographs a second. Many were taken immediately after each other as stereo pairs or panorama sequences. This calculation was based on a single astronaut on the surface, and does not take into account that there were two persons sharing the workload during the EVA.
8. The photos contain artifacts like the two seemingly matching 'C's on a rock and on the ground.
9. A resident of Perth, Australia, with the pseudonym "Una Ronald", said she saw a soft drink bottle in the frame.
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- No such newspaper reports or recordings have been verified. "Una Ronald"'s existence is authenticated by only one source. There are also flaws in the story, i.e. the emphatic statement that she had to "stay up late" is easily discounted by numerous witnesses in Australia who observed the event to occur in the middle of their daytime, since this event was an unusual compulsory viewing for school children in Australia.[102]
10. The book Moon Shot contains an obvious composite photograph of Alan Shepard hitting a golf ball on the Moon with another astronaut.
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- It was used in lieu of the only existing real images, from the TV monitor, which the editors of the book apparently felt were too grainy to present in a book's picture section. The book publishers did not work for NASA.
11. There appear to be "hot spots" in some photographs that look like a huge spotlight was used at a close distance.
-
- Pits in Moon dust focus and reflect light in a manner similar to minuscule glass spheres used in the coating of street signs, or dew-drops on wet grass. This creates a glow around the photographer's own shadow when it appears in a photograph. (see Heiligenschein)
- If the photographer is standing in sunlight while photographing into shade, light reflected off his white spacesuit produces a similar effect to a spotlight.[103]
- Some widely-published Apollo photos were high contrast copies. Scans of the original transparencies are in general much more uniformly illuminated.
12. Footprints in the extraordinarily fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, in the minds of some observers – as if made in wet sand.
-
- The dust has not been weathered like Earth sand and has sharp edges. This gives it a special property in a vacuum of sticking together like that. The astronauts described it as being like "talcum powder or wet sand".[98]
- This theory was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".
 The original Buzz Aldrin photograph. |  Photo of Earth taken from behind the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. |  TV image of the actual scene. |
[edit] Ionizing radiation and heat
1. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt and galactic ambient radiation (see radiation poisoning). Some hoax theorists have suggested that Starfish Prime (high altitude nuclear testing in 1962) was a failed attempt to disrupt the Van Allen belts.
-
- The spacecraft moved through the belts in about four hours, and the astronauts were protected from the ionizing radiation by the aluminium hulls of the spacecraft. In addition, the orbital transfer trajectory from the Earth to the Moon through the belts was selected to minimize radiation exposure. Even Dr. James Van Allen, the discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, rebutted the claims that radiation levels were too dangerous for the Apollo missions.[104] Plait cited an average dose of less than 1 rem, which is equivalent to the ambient radiation received by living at sea level for three years.[105] The spacecraft passed through the intense inner belt and the low-energy outer belt. The astronauts were mostly shielded from the radiation by the spacecraft. The total radiation received on the trip was about the same as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy field for a year.[106]
-
- The radiation is actually evidence that the astronauts went to the Moon. Irene Schneider reports that thirty-three of the thirty-six Apollo astronauts involved in the nine Apollo missions to leave Earth orbit have developed early stage cataracts that have been shown to be caused by radiation exposure to cosmic rays during their trip.[107] However, only twenty-seven astronauts left Earth orbit. At least thirty-nine former astronauts have developed cataracts. Thirty-six of those were involved in high-radiation missions such as the Apollo lunar missions.[108]
2. Film in the cameras would have been fogged by this radiation.
-
- The film was kept in metal containers that prevented radiation from fogging the film's emulsion.[109] In addition, film carried by unmanned lunar probes such as the Lunar Orbiter and Luna 3 (which used on-board film development processes) was not fogged.
3. The Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted.
-
- There is no atmosphere to efficiently couple lunar surface heat to devices such as cameras not in direct contact with it. In a vacuum, only radiation remains as a heat transfer mechanism. The physics of radiative heat transfer are thoroughly understood, and the proper use of passive optical coatings and paints was adequate to control the temperature of the film within the cameras; lunar module temperatures were controlled with similar coatings that gave it its gold color. Also, while the Moon's surface does get very hot at lunar noon, every Apollo landing was made shortly after lunar sunrise at the landing site. During the longer stays, the astronauts did notice increased cooling loads on their spacesuits as the sun continued to rise and the surface temperature increased, but the effect was easily countered by the passive and active cooling systems.[110] The film was not in direct sunlight, so it wasn't overheated.[111]
-
- Note: all of the lunar landings occurred during the lunar daytime. The Moon's day is approximately 29½ days long, and as a consequence a single lunar day (dawn to dusk) lasts nearly fifteen days. As such there was no sunrise or sunset while the astronauts were on the surface. Most lunar missions occurred during the first few Earth days of the lunar day.
4. The Apollo 16 crew should not have survived a big solar flare firing out when they were on their way to the Moon. They should have been fried.
[edit] Transmissions
1. The lack of a more than two-second delay in two-way communications at a distance of a 400,000 km (250,000 miles).
-
- The round trip light travel time of more than two seconds is apparent in all the real-time recordings of the lunar audio, but this does not always appear as expected. There may also be some documentary films where the delay has been edited out. Principal motivations for editing the audio would likely come in response to time constraints or in the interest of clarity.[114]
2. Typical delays in communication were on the order of half a second.
-
- Claims that the delays were only on the order of half a second are unsubstantiated by an examination of the actual recordings. It should also be borne in mind that there should not be a straightforward, consistent time delay between every response, as the conversation is being recorded at one end - Mission Control. Responses from Mission Control could be heard without any delay, as the recording is being made at the same time that Houston receives the transmission from the Moon.
3. The Parkes Observatory in Australia was billed to the world for weeks as the site that would be relaying communications from the Moon, then five hours before transmission they were told to stand down.
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- The timing of the first Moonwalk was moved up after landing. In fact, delays in getting the Moonwalk started meant that Parkes did cover almost the entire Apollo 11 Moonwalk.[115]
4. Parkes supposedly provided the clearest video feed from the Moon, but Australian media and all other known sources ran a live feed from the United States.
-
- While that was the original plan, and, according to some sources, the official policy, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) did take the transmission direct from the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek radio telescopes. These were converted to NTSC television at Paddington, in Sydney. This meant that Australian viewers saw the Moonwalk several seconds before the rest of the world.[116] See also The Parkes Observatory's Support of the Apollo 11 Mission, from "Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia" The events surrounding the Parkes Observatory's role in relaying the live television of man's first steps on the Moon were portrayed in a slightly fictionalized 2000 Australian film comedy The Dish.
5. Better signal was supposedly received at Parkes Observatory when the Moon was on the opposite side of the planet.
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- This is not supported by the detailed evidence and logs from the missions.[117]
[edit] Mechanical issues
1. No blast crater or any sign of dust scatter as was seen in the 16 mm movies of each landing.[118]
-
- No crater should be expected. The Descent Propulsion System was throttled very far down during the final landing. The Lunar Module was no longer rapidly decelerating, so the descent engine only had to support the module's own weight, diminished by the 1/6 g lunar gravity and by the near exhaustion of the descent propellants. At landing, the engine thrust divided by the nozzle exit area is only about 10 kilopascals (1.5 PSI).[119] Beyond the engine nozzle, the plume spreads and the pressure drops very rapidly. (In comparison the Saturn V F-1 first stage engines produced 3.2 MPa (459 PSI) at the mouth of the nozzle.) Rocket exhaust gases expand much more rapidly after leaving the engine nozzle in a vacuum than in an atmosphere. The effect of an atmosphere on rocket plumes can be easily seen in launches from Earth; as the rocket rises through the thinning atmosphere, the exhaust plumes broaden very noticeably. To reduce this, rocket engines designed for vacuum operation have longer bells than those designed for use at the Earth's surface, but they still cannot prevent this spreading. The Lunar Module's exhaust gases therefore expanded rapidly well beyond the landing site. However, the descent engines did scatter a lot of very fine surface dust as seen in 16mm movies of each landing, and many mission commanders commented on its effect on visibility. The landers were generally moving horizontally as well as vertically, and photographs do show scouring of the surface along the final descent path. Finally, the lunar regolith is very compact below its surface dust layer, further making it impossible for the descent engine to blast out a "crater".[120] In fact, a blast crater was measured under the Apollo 11 Lunar Module using shadow lengths of the descent engine bell and estimates of the amount that the landing gear had compressed and how deep the lander footpads had pressed into the lunar surface and it was found that the engine had eroded between 4 and 6 inches of regolith out from underneath the engine bell during the final descent and landing.[121],pp. 97-98
2. The second stage of the launch rocket and / or the Lunar Module ascent stage produced no visible flame.
-
- The Lunar Module used Aerozine 50 (fuel) and dinitrogen tetroxide (oxidizer) propellants, chosen for simplicity and reliability; they ignite hypergolically –upon contact– without the need for a spark. These propellants produce a nearly transparent exhaust.[122] The same fuel was used by the core of the American Titan rocket. The transparency of their plumes is apparent in many launch photos. The plumes of rocket engines fired in a vacuum spread out very rapidly as they leave the engine nozzle (see above), further reducing their visibility. Finally, rocket engines often run "rich" to slow internal corrosion. On Earth, the excess fuel burns in contact with atmospheric oxygen. This cannot happen in a vacuum.
 Apollo 17 LM leaving the Moon; rocket exhaust visible only briefly. |  Apollo 8 launch through the first stage separation |  Exhaust flame may not be visible outside the atmosphere, as in this photo. Rocket engines are the dark structures at the bottom center. |
 The launch of a Titan II, burning hypergolic Aerozine-50/N2O4, 430,000 pounds-force (1.9 MN) of thrust. Note the near-transparency of the exhaust, even in air (water is being sprayed up from below). |  Bright flame from first stage of the Saturn V, burning RP-1 |
3. The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antarctica.
- See the Moon rocks section below
4. The presence of deep dust around the module; given the blast from the landing engine, this should not be present.
-
- The dust is created by a continuous rain of micro-meteoroid impacts and is typically several inches thick. It forms the top of the lunar regolith, a layer of impact rubble several meters thick and highly compacted with depth. On the Earth, an exhaust plume might stir up the atmosphere over a wide area. On the Moon, only the exhaust gas itself can disturb the dust. Some areas around descent engines were scoured clean.[120]
- Note: In addition, moving footage of astronauts and the lunar rover kicking up lunar dust clearly show the dust particles kicking up quite high due to the low gravity, but settling immediately without air to stop them. Had these landings been faked on the Earth, dust clouds would have formed. (They can be seen as a 'goof' in the movie Apollo 13 when Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) imagines walking on the Moon). This clearly shows the astronauts to be (a) in low gravity and (b) in a vacuum.
5. The flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon. Sibrel said "The wind was probably caused by intense air-conditioning used to cool the astronauts in their lightened, uncirculated space suits. The cooling systems in the backpacks would have been removed to lighten the load not designed for Earth's six times heavier gravity, otherwise they might have fallen over".
-
- The astronauts were moving the flag into position. Without air drag, these movements caused the free corner of the flag to swing like a pendulum for some time. A horizontal rod, visible in many photographs, extended from the top of the flagpole to hold the flag out for proper display. The flag's rippled appearance was from folding during storage, and it could be mistaken for motion in a still photograph. The top support rod telescoped and the crew of Apollo 11 could not fully extend it. Later crews preferred to only partially extend the rod. Videotapes show that when the flag stops after the astronauts let it go, it remains motionless. At one point the flag remains completely motionless for well over thirty minutes. See the photographs below.
 |  |
 |
- The flag is not waving, but is swinging as a pendulum after being touched by the astronauts. Here[123] is a thirty-minute Apollo 11 video showing that the flag does not move.
- This theory was demonstrated to be unsubstantiated on the MythBusters episode "NASA Moon Landing".
6. The Lander weighed 17 tons and sat on top of the sand making no impression but directly next to it footprints can be seen in the sand.
-
- The lander weighed less than three tons on the Moon. The astronauts were much lighter than the lander, but their boots were much smaller than the 1-meter landing pads. Pressure, or force per unit area, rather than force, determines the extent of regolith compression. In some photos the landing pads did press into the regolith, especially when they moved sideways at touchdown. (The bearing pressure under the lander feet, with the lander being more than 100 times the weight of the astronauts would in fact have been of similar magnitude to the bearing pressure exerted by the astronauts' boots.)
7. The air conditioning units that were part of the astronauts' spacesuits could not have worked in an environment of no atmosphere.
-
- The cooling units could only work in a vacuum. Water from a tank in the backpack flowed out through tiny pores in a metal sublimator plate where it quickly vaporized into space. The loss of the heat of vaporization froze the remaining water, forming a layer of ice on the outside of the plate that also sublimated into space (turning from a solid directly into a gas). A separate water loop flowed through the LCG (Liquid Cooling Garment) worn by the astronaut, carrying his metabolic waste heat through the sublimator plate where it was cooled and returned to the LCG. Twelve pounds [5.4 kg] of feedwater provided some eight hours of cooling; because of its bulk, it was often the limiting consumable on the length of an EVA. Because this system could not work in an atmosphere, the astronauts required large external chillers to keep them comfortable during Earth training.
- Radiative cooling would have avoided the need to consume water, but it could not operate below body temperature in such a small volume. The radioisotope thermoelectric generators, could use radiative cooling fins to permit indefinite operation because they operated at much higher temperatures.
8. Although Apollo 11 had made an almost embarrassingly imprecise landing well outside the designated target area, Apollo 12 succeeded, on November 19, 1969, in making a pin-point landing, within walking distance (less than 200 meters) of the Surveyor 3 probe, which had landed on the Moon in April 1967.
-
- The Apollo 11 landing was several kilometers to the southeast of the center of their intended landing ellipse, but still within it. Armstrong took semi-automatic control[124] of the lander and directed it further down range when it was noted that the intended landing site was strewn with boulders near a moderate sized crater. By the time Apollo 12 flew, the cause of the large error in the landing location was determined and improved procedures were developed and were demonstrated by the pin-point landing next to Surveyor III made by Apollo 12. Apollo 11 fulfilled its purpose by simply landing safely on the lunar surface and a pin-point landing was not a requirement on that mission.
- The Apollo astronauts were highly skilled pilots, and the LM was a maneuverable craft that could be accurately flown to a specific landing point. During the powered descent phase the astronauts used the PNGS (Primary Navigation Guidance System) and LPD (Landing Point Designator) to predict where the LM was going to land, and then they would manually pilot the LM to a selected point with great accuracy.
9. The alleged Moon landings used either a sound stage, or were put outside in a remote desert location with the astronauts either using harnesses or slow-motion photography to make it look like they were on the Moon and acting in lunar gravity.
-
- While the HBO Mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon", and a scene from "Apollo 13" used the sound-stage and harness setup, it is clearly seen from those films that dust kicked up did not quickly settle (some dust briefly formed clouds). In the film footage from the Apollo missions, dust kicked up by the astronauts' boots and the wheels of the lunar rovers shot up quite high (due to the lunar gravity), and settled immediately to the surface in an uninterrupted parabolic arc (due to there being no air to support the dust). Even if there had been a sound stage for hoax Moon landings that had had the air pumped out, the dust would have reached nowhere near the height and trajectory as the dust shown in the Apollo film footage because of terrestrial gravity.
-
- This video from Apollo 15 shows that they were in low gravity and in a vacuum:
10. All six lunar landings occurred during the first presidential administration of Richard Nixon and no other national leader of any country has even claimed to have landed astronauts on the Moon, even though the mechanical means of doing so should have become progressively much easier after almost 40 years of steady or even rapid technological development.
-
- Other nations and later presidential administrations were evidently less interested in spending large sums to be merely the second nation to land on the Moon or to explore the barren Moon further. Had Nixon faked the Moon landings, the Soviets would have been happy to argue for a hoax as a propaganda victory, but the Soviets never did. Further exploration by the U.S. or U.S.S.R., such as establishing a Moon base, would have been much more expensive and perhaps too provocative to be in any nation's self-interest during the Cold War arms race.[citation needed]
-
- Furthermore, the development of the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo CSM and LM and the flights up to Apollo 8 (which orbited the moon) were completed before Richard Nixon became president on January 20, 1969. Additionally, Nixon did not personally care much for the program started by the man who defeated him in the 1960 Presidential Election, and his administration pushed for NASA to cancel Apollo 18, 19, and 20 in favor of development of the space shuttle.[citation needed]
[edit] Moon rocks
The Apollo Program collected a total of 382 kilograms (840 lb) of Moon rocks during the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions. Analyses by scientists worldwide all agree that these rocks came from the Moon — no published accounts in peer-reviewed scientific journals exist that dispute this claim. The Apollo samples are easily distinguishable from both meteorites and terrestrial rocks[125] in that they show a complete lack of hydrous alteration products, they show evidence for having been subjected to impact events on an airless body, and they have unique geochemical characteristics. Furthermore, most are significantly older than the oldest rocks found on Earth. The Moon rocks are more than 600,000,000 years older than the oldest Earth rocks known at the time. In 2008 some rocks were found on Earth that are older than any previously found Earth rocks but the Moon rocks are still more than 200,000,000 years older than them. The Moon rocks also share the same characteristics as the Soviet lunar samples that were obtained at a later date.[126]
Hoax proponents argue that Wernher von Braun's trip to Antarctica in 1967 (approximately two years before the July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 launch) was in order to study and/or collect lunar meteorites to be used as fake Moon rocks. Because von Braun was a former SS officer (though one who had been detained by the Gestapo),[127] the documentary film Did We Go? suggests[64] that he could have been susceptible to pressure to agree to the conspiracy in order to protect himself from recriminations over the past. While NASA does not provide much information about why von Braun, the Marshall Space Flight Center Director, and three others were in Antarctica at that time; NASA has said that the purpose was "to look into environmental and logistic factors that might relate to the planning of future space missions, and hardware".[128] An article by Sankar Chatterjee at Texas Tech University states that von Braun sent a letter to F. Alton Wade, Chatterjee's predecessor, and that "Von Braun was searching for a secretive locale to help train the United States' earliest astronauts. Wade pointed von Braun to Antarctica."[citation needed] NASA continues to send teams to work in McMurdo Dry Valleys, and to mimic the conditions on other planets such as Mars and the Moon.
It is now accepted by the scientific community that rocks have been ejected from both the Martian and lunar surface during impact events, and that some of these have landed on the Earth in the form of Martian and lunar meteorites.[129][130] However, the first Antarctic lunar meteorite was collected in 1979, and its lunar origin was not recognized until 1982.[131] Furthermore, lunar meteorites are so rare that it is very improbable that they could account for the 382 kilograms of Moon rocks that NASA obtained between 1969 and 1972. Currently, there are only about 30 kilograms of lunar meteorites discovered thus far, despite private collectors and governmental agencies worldwide searching for these for more than 20 years.[131]
The large combined mass of the Apollo samples makes this scenario implausible. While the Apollo missions obtained 382 kilograms of Moon rocks, the Soviet Luna 16, Luna 20, and Luna 24 robotic sample return missions only obtained 326 grams combined (that is, less than one-thousandth as much). Indeed, current plans for a Martian sample return would only obtain about 500 grams of soil,[132] and a recently proposed South Pole-Aitken basin sample return mission would only obtain about 1 kilogram of Moon rock.[133] If a similar technology to collect the Apollo Moon rocks was used as with the Soviet missions or modern sample return proposals, then between 300 and 2000 robotic sample return missions would be required to obtain the current mass of Moon rocks that is curated by NASA.
Concerning the composition of the Moon rocks, Kaysing asked: "Why was there no mention of gold, silver, diamonds, or other precious metals on the Moon? It was never discussed by the press or astronauts."[134] Geologists realize that gold and silver deposits on Earth are the result of the action of hydrothermal fluids concentrating the precious metals into veins of ore. Since in 1969 water was believed to be absent on the Moon, no geologist would bother discussing the possibility of finding these on the Moon in any significant quantity.
[edit] Deaths of key Apollo personnel
In a television program about the hoax allegations, Fox Entertainment Group listed the deaths of ten astronauts and of two civilians related to the manned spaceflight program as having possibly been killed as part of a cover-up.
- Theodore Freeman (T-38 crash, 1964)
- Elliot See and Charlie Bassett (T-38 accident, 1966)
- Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967).
- Edward Higgins "Ed" White (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
- Roger B. Chaffee (Apollo 1 fire, January 1967)
- Edward "Ed" Givens (car accident, 1967)
- Clifton "C. C." Williams (T-38 accident, October 1967)
- X-15 pilot Michael J. "Mike" Adams (the only X-15 pilot killed during the X-15 flight test program in November 1967 - not a NASA astronaut, but had flown X-15 above 50 miles).
- Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., scheduled to be an Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory pilot, who died in a jet crash in December 1967, shortly after reporting for duty to that (later canceled) program.
- NASA worker Thomas Ronald Baron (automobile collision with train, 1967 shortly after making accusations before Congress about the cause of the Apollo 1 fire, after which he was fired). Ruled as suicide. Baron was a quality control inspector who wrote a report critical of the Apollo program and was an outspoken critic after the Apollo 1 fire. Baron and his family were killed as their car was struck by a train at a train crossing.[135][136]
- Brian Welch, a leading official in NASA's Public Affairs Office, died a few months after appearing in the media to debunk the Fox pro-Moon hoax television show cited above.[4]
All but one of the astronaut deaths (Irwin's) were directly related to their job with NASA or the Air Force. Two of the astronauts, Mike Adams and Robert Lawrence, had no connection with the civilian manned space program. Astronaut James Irwin had suffered several heart attacks in the years prior to his death. There is no independent confirmation of Gelvani's claim that Irwin was about to come forward. All except two of the deaths occurred at least one or two years before Apollo 11 and the subsequent flights. Brian Welch's death would have been a blow against the alleged Hoax Conspirators since he was a debunker of hoax claims.
As of April 2010 nine of the twelve astronauts who landed on the Moon still survive, including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.[137]
[edit] Alleged non-NASA involvement
Stanley Kubrick is accused of having produced much of the footage for Apollo 11 and 12, presumably because he had just directed 2001: A Space Odyssey which is partly set on the moon and featured advanced special effects.[35] It has been claimed that when 2001 was in post-production in early 1968, NASA secretly approached Kubrick to direct the first three Moon landings. The launch and splashdown would be real but the spacecraft would remain in Earth orbit and fake footage broadcast as "live" from the lunar journey. No evidence was presented for this theory, which ignores many facts. For example, 2001 was released before the first Apollo landing and Kubrick's depiction of the lunar surface is vastly different from its actual appearance in Apollo video, film and photography. Kubrick did hire Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange, both of whom had worked for NASA and major aerospace contractors, to work with him on 2001. Kubrick also used some 50 mm f/0.7 lenses that were left over from a batch made by Zeiss for NASA. However, Kubrick only acquired this lens for Barry Lyndon (1975). The lens was originally a still-photo lens and required modifications to be used for motion filming. (There is a mockumentary based on this idea, Dark Side of the Moon, which is clearly tongue-in-cheek by claiming to interview people with names as Dave Bowman or Jack Torrance, but could have contributed to the conspiracy theory in the eyes of casual viewers.)
To date, nobody from the United States government or NASA who would have had a connection to the space program has come forward claiming the moon landings were staged. Penn Jillette made note of this in the "Conspiracy Theories" episode of his contrarian television show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in 2005. He stated that, with the number of people that would have been required to be "in the know" of the staging, somebody would have outed the hoax by now. With the government's track record of keeping secrets (especially the Nixon administration, noting Watergate as an example), Jillette said there's no way the U.S. government could have silenced everybody if the landings were faked.
[edit] NASA book incident
In 2002, NASA granted US$15,000 to James Oberg for a commission to write a point-by-point rebuttal of the hoax claims. NASA subsequently canceled the commission later in the year, in the face of complaints that the book would dignify the accusations.[4] Oberg stated that he intended to finish the project.[138][139] In November 2002 Peter Jennings said "[NASA] is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the Moon." and "[NASA] had been so rattled, [they] hired [somebody] to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists." Oberg says that belief in the hoax theories is not the fault of the hoax proponents or believers, and that he puts the blame on educators and people (including NASA) who should provide information to the public.[4]
[edit] See also
- Astronauts Gone Wild
- In the Shadow of the Moon
- Dark Side of the Moon (documentary)
- Apollo hoax in popular culture
- Third-party evidence for Apollo Moon landings
[edit] Notes
- ^ According to the 2007 NOVA episode "Sputnik Declassified", the United States could have launched the Explorer 1 probe before Sputnik, but the Eisenhower administration hesitated, first because they were not sure if international law meant that national borders kept going all the way into orbit (and, thus, their orbiting satellite could cause an international uproar by violating the borders of dozens of nations), and second because there was a desire to see the not yet ready Vanguard satellite program, designed by American citizens, become America's first satellite rather than the Explorer program, that was mostly designed by former rocket designers from Nazi Germany. A transcript of the appropriate section from the show is available at "A Blow to the Nation".
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Plait 2002, pp. 154-73.
- ^ van Bakel, Rogier (September 1994). "The Wrong Stuff". Wired (Condé Nast Publications). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/moon.land.html?pg=5&topic=. Retrieved August 13, 2009. "Millions of Americans believe the Moon landings may have been a US$25 billion swindle, perpetrated by NASA with the latest in communications technology and the best in special effects."
- ^ Oberg, James (July 1999). "Getting Apollo 11 right". ABC News. http://web.archive.org/web/20030402094521/http://abcnews.go.com/ABC2000/abc2000science/oberg2000.html. Retrieved August 13, 2009. "I'm told that this is official dogma still taught in schools in Cuba, plus wherever else Cuban teachers have been sent (such as Sandinista Nicaragua and Angola)."
- ^ a b c d Oberg, James. "Lessons of the 'Fake Moon Flight' Myth," Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 2003, pp. 23, 30. Reprinted in Frazier, Kendrick (ed.) (2009). Science Under Siege. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-59102-715-7
- ^ a b Plait 2002, p. 156.
- ^ a b Borenstein, Seth (November 2, 2002). "Book to confirm Moon landings". Deseret News (Salt Lake City). http://archive.deseretnews.com/archive/946348/Book-to-confirm-moon-landings.html. Retrieved August 13, 2009.
- ^ Gallup (February 15, 2001). "Did Men Really Land on the Moon?". Press release. http://www.gallup.com/poll/1993/Did-Men-Really-Land-Moon.aspx. Retrieved August 14, 2009.
- ^ Gallup (July 20, 1999). "Landing a Man on the Moon: The Public's View". Press release. http://www.gallup.com/poll/3712/Landing-Man-Moon-Publics-View.aspx. Retrieved August 14, 2009.
- ^ "One giant leap of imagination". The Age. Associated Press (Melbourne, Australia). December 24, 2002. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/12/24/1040511043172.html. Retrieved August 13, 2009.
- ^ "American Beat: Moon Stalker". Newsweek Web Exclusive (New York). September 16, 2002. http://www.newsweek.com/id/65087/output/print. Retrieved August 13, 2009.
- ^ Public Opinion Fund (April 19, 2000). "БЫЛИ ЛИ АМЕРИКАНЦЫ НА ЛУНЕ?" (in Russian). Press release. http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/sci_sci/kosmos/of001605. Retrieved August 13, 2009. [unreliable source?]
- ^ "Britons question Apollo 11 Moon landings, survey reveals". Engineering & Technology (London: The Institution of Engineering and Technology). July 8, 2009. http://kn.theiet.org/news/jul09/moon-landing-survey.cfm. Retrieved August 13, 2009.
- ^ "The Cosmic Grid", by Liz Kruesi, Astronomy Magazine, Dec. 2009, p. 62.
- ^ Schadewald, Robert J. (July 1980). "The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! Says This Prophet". Science Digest (New York).
- ^ a b Kaysing 2002, p. 7.
- ^ "Irrefutable proof [Archive] - Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum". Bad Astronomy online forum post. May 3, 2002. http://www.bautforum.com/archive/index.php/t-1180.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008. [unreliable source?]
- ^ Lheureux 2000 (page needed).
- ^ a b Chaikin 2007, p. 2.
- ^ "Was The Apollo Moon Landing Fake?". APFN.org. July 21, 2009. http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ Kaysing 2002, pp. 26–40.
- ^ Kaysing 2002, p. 71.
- ^ Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2001, pg 77.
- ^ Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2001, pgs 330-331.
- ^ Plait 2002, p. 173
- ^ "Moon Hoax MOONMOVIE.COM Frequently Asked Questions". Moonmovie.com. 2007. http://www.moonmovie.com/faq.htm. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ "Clavius: Bibliography - bill kaysing". Clavius.org. http://www.clavius.org/kaysing.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ Plait 2002, p. 157
- ^ AFTH, LLC website
- ^ "Moon Hoax - A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon DVD - Front Cover & Bart Sibrel". Moonmovie.com. http://moonmovie.com/afthft.htm. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ "Lunar Legacy", Vimeo.
- ^ "Buzz Aldrin Punches Bart Sibrel". YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUI36tPKDg4. [unreliable source?]
- ^ Bancroft, Colette (September 29, 2002). "Lunar Lunacy". St. Petersburg Times. http://www.sptimes.com/2002/09/29/Floridian/Lunar_lunacy.shtml. Retrieved February 13, 2007.
- ^ "Bibliography - dramatis personae". Clavius.org. http://www.clavius.org/bibcast.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ Matthews, Robert (November 25, 2002). "Telescope to challenge moon doubters". Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/24/1037697982142.html. Retrieved August 5, 2009.
- ^ a b "Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky !". Groundzeromedia.org. http://www.groundzeromedia.org/archives/dis/gorsky/gorsky.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ "The Apollo Hoax". Ufos-aliens.co.uk. http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ "Clavius: Photo Analysis - buzz's hot spot". Clavius.org. http://www.clavius.org/bootspot.html. Retrieved June 25, 2009.
- ^ Mukhin, Jury. ""AntiApollo". The Moon affair of the USA" (in Russian). http://ymukhin.ru/?q=node/35. [unreliable source?]
- ^ Popov, Alexander. "A man on the Moon ? What evidence ?", part 2 (Russian)
- ^ Popov, Alexander. "Americans on the Moon - a great breakthrough or a space affair ?" (Russian)
- ^ Investigations: Moon, Supernovum.ru (Russian)
- ^ Pokrovsky, Professional.ru (Russian)
- ^ Pokrovsky, Stanislav. "A more exact reconstruction", April 27, 2008. (Russian)
- ^ Longuski 2006, p. 102
- ^ David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories, 2010, ISBN 978-1-59448-895-5, pp. 1-2, 6.
- ^ Calder, Vince; Johnson, Andrew P.E. (October 12, 2002). "Ask A Scientist". Newton. Argonne National Laboratory. http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen01/gen01278.htm. Retrieved August 14, 2009.
- ^ Ramsay 2006 (page needed)
- ^ "Hubble Shoots The Moon". NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/hubble_moon.html. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
- ^ a b Richmond, Michael (August 17, 2002). "Can we see Apollo hardware on the Moon?". Tass-survey.org. http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/lunar_lander.html. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ David, Leonard (April 27, 2001). "Apollo 15 Landing Site Spotted in Images". Space.com. http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/apollo15_touchdown_photos_010427.html. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ "SPACE.com - End of Conspiracy Theories? Spacecraft Snoops Apollo Moon Sites". Space.com. http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/050304_moon_snoop.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ Matthews, Robert (November 24, 2002). "World's biggest telescope to prove Americans really walked on Moon". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1414144/Worlds-biggest-telescope-to-prove-Americans-really-walked-on-Moon.html. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ European Southern Observatory (September 20, 2006). "To Be or Not to Be: Is It All About Spinning?". Press release. http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/pr-35-06.html. Retrieved September 5, 2009.
- ^ Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (May 20, 2009). "The "halo" area around Apollo 15 landing site observed by Terrain Camera on SELENE(KAGUYA)". Press release. http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2008/05/20080520_kaguya_e.html. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ "The Human Moon". The New York Times. 2009-11-16. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opinion/17tue4.html. Retrieved 2009-11-19.
- ^ Dunbar, Brian (July 17, 2009). "NASA's LRO Spacecraft Gets its First Look at Apollo Landing Sites". in Garner, Robert. NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html. Retrieved August 14, 2009. "NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions' lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon's surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules' locations evident."
- ^ Garner, Robert (July 17, 2009). "LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites". NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images of the Apollo 12 landing site". http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/lroc_20090903_apollo12.html.
- ^ Kelly, A (September 10, 2009). "A Hoax Believer Response to the LRO Photographs". LunarLandingHoax.com. http://lunarlandinghoax.com/2009/09/10/a-hb-response-to-the-lro-photos/. Retrieved September 10, 2009.
- ^ Hendry, Martin; Skeldon, Ken (February 17, 2005). "Did we really land on the Moon?". Cafescientifique.org. http://www.cafescientifique.org/glasgow1.htm. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ Di Maggio, Mario (November 2004). "Hoax Busters". Dimaggio.org. http://www.dimaggio.org/Glasgow/SPST/nov_2004.htm. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
- ^ missing blueprints
- ^ blueprints not saved
- ^ a b "Did We Go? The Evidence Is In!". Moonhoax.com. http://Moonhoax.com/site/evidence.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
- ^ Sarkissian, John (February 25, 2009). "On Eagle's Wings". http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/news_events/apollo11/introduction.html. Retrieved September 5, 2009.
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- ^ Carmelo Amalfi, Lost Moon landing tapes discovered, Cosmos Magazine, November 1, 2006
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- ^ LM-13
- ^ Gerard, Jim. "A field guide to American spacecraft — Lunar Module Index". http://web.mac.com/jimgerard/AFGAS/pages/lunarmod/index.html. Retrieved September 2, 2009.
- ^ "The Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle". NASA. http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_lrv.html. Retrieved November 25, 2008.
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[edit] References
- Lheureux, Philippe (2000). Lumières sur la Lune. Editions Carnot. ISBN 2912362490. http://lheureux.free.fr/.
- Plait, Philip (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax". John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-40976-6.
- Kaysing, Bill (2002). We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. Pomeroy, WA, USA: Health Research Books. ISBN 1-85810-422-X.
- Longuski, Jim (2006). The seven secrets of how to think like a rocket scientist. Springer. ISBN 0387308768.
- Ramsay, Robin (2006). Conspiracy Theories. Pocket Essentials. ISBN 190404865X.
- Chaikin, Andrew (2007). A Man on the Moon. ISBN 978-0-14-311235-8. "We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things – not because they are easy, but because they are hard." –President John Kennedy, speaking at Rice University, September 12, 1962.
- Mindell, David A (2008). Digital Apollo. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-13497-2.
- Woods, W. David (2008). How Apollo Flew to the Moon (Springer Praxis Books / Space Exploration). Praxis. ISBN 978-0-387-71675-6.
[edit] External links
- Apollo Lunar Surface Journal Photos, audio, video and complete communication transcriptions of the six successful landings and Apollo 13
- Hoax: Lunar Landing at the Open Directory Project
- "A Moon Landing? What Moon Landing?". The New York Times. December 18, 1969. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20F12F739581B7493CAA81789D95F4D8685F9. Retrieved August 5, 2008. , John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, December 18, 1969, p. 30.
- Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors John Schwartz for The New York Times July 13, 2009
- Buzz Aldrin Punches Moon Landing Conspiracy Theorist In The Face - video report by The Huffington Post
- ABC News Refuting the Most Popular Apollo Moon Landing Hoax Theories
[edit] Television specials
- Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (2001) (TV) at the Internet Movie Database
- Opération lune (2002) (TV) at the Internet Movie Database
- The Truth Behind the Moon Landings (2003) (TV) at the Internet Movie Database
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