THE ONE BEST THINGS ABOUT THE NEW MOON MISSIONS
They are debunking the silly Apollo deniers and flat-earthers
I am not excited about the Artemis moon mission. Kind of a yawner. Been there and done that. Specifically, Apollo 8 which went to and orbited the moon – which Artemis 2 did not – and people first saw the lunar farside. When it was a brand new thing just 70 years less than after the first airplanes. When the V-2 that was the ancestor of the then stupendous Saturn V – thanks to Hitler’s rocketeer Werhner von Braun for both -- had pummeled London only a quarter century prior. It was like way cool to this young lad. Although the reading Genesis thing was annoying.
People in space is a very dubious proposition for many, many reasons. It will always be super expensive getting humans into Earth orbit much less beyond. People have to be contained within considerable Earth mimicking habitat cocoons that require boosters of thousands of tons. Most of which is fuel that is burned off to get to 17+K mph a 100+ miles up. That will always cost a whole lot even if the boosters are reusable – it takes a few hundred times more fuel per passenger to get into orbit than to fly around the world in an airliner, do the spreadsheet math. Going to the moon or further piles on the expenses to literally astronomical levels. Space is a vastly worse place for people than is say the south pole at the dead of winter. There at least one can always get enough oxygen, and is shielded from constant radiation bombardment by the planetary magnetic field. Dress warm enough with fur et al. and a person is fine. They cannot hear you scream in the vacuum that is space.
Mortality rates will always be – excuse the puns – sky high. Fire in a building? Get out. Big fire or major air breach in a space habitat? Oh well. During the Artemis mission I was nervously hoping the crew would get back OK. I didn’t need the stress.
And let’s not forget the environmental impact. Folks living near the Musk launch complex on the Texas coast are finding out what kind of hell that is as the launch frequency ramps up. Horrendous launch noise that freaks out the wildlife for miles around, toxic smoke drifting downwind. If Elon’s dream come true it will become multiple launches a day, with the occasional titanic booster explosion on the pad or at low altitude to further spice things up. If the pace of rocket launches reaches the soaring levels some dream of, the upper atmosphere will be seriously contaminated by burned fuel pollutants (the way to avoid this would be using hydrogen fuel exclusively, that produces only water).
Despite all the Musk/Zubin talk, there is not a viable business model for human space exploration and exploitation. Which is why it is largely funded by deep pocket governments with mucho taxpayer money to burn. Private enterprise is not ponying up because it is a bottomless money pit without prospect of gain.
All that said - and I could say a whole lot more - there is one item that I do like about the 21st personed (avoiding being sexist here) moon missions. It is putting some nice big Type-93 torpedoes into the hulls of the Apollo denial and flat earther crowds. I say crowds because polls indicate a few million Americans fit into those categories, with the FEs which are all ADs being well outnumbered by the ADs, most of whom are not FEs. For my discourse on the nutty FE clique see https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/one-of-the-many-many-reasons-faith.
In the AD conspiracy theory, the Apollo project was a big fake that casually and callously slanders many with being mega liars, Including Stanley Kubrick who provided the pretend moonscapes, you see. Which is BS because the lunarscapes in 2001 A Space Odyssey are the classic, craggy, badlands like terrain that had been common to moon art -- until the Apollo missions showed everything up there has been smoothed off like the Appalachians by billions of years of persistent micro-meteorite bombardment – I remember being very startled to realize that. And BTW how is it that the Soviets and Red Chinese did not denounce the imperialist capitalist Yankee running dog moon landings as frauds if they actually were such?
Anyhow, a BIG argument that the ADs have deployed with considerable success among the gullible is that if we did get the moon back in 1968-72, then why have we not bothered to go back since? Hmmm? The idea being that we never did go in the first place. That for one reason or another lunar excursions not being doable, so of course no government has bothered to fake it again. The chances of their being caught out having risen what with all the skeptics around and about these days with online truth telling sites ready to swiftly announce and denounce the new space fraud. This thesis was working fairly well, all the more so because each new “we’re going back just you wait and see” plan and project has fallen by the wayside or been delayed and delayed. So clearly it is all misleading halls and mirrors…..
Until now. The big rocket did go up – about six years later than planned and two or three fold more expensive, but hey this is government work. We have gone back to deep space. More pretty pics of Earth rising over the moon. All with live streaming with the friendly chipper, engaging crew chatting about this and that – who can’t believe them? So a core premise of AD is as sunk as is battleship Yamato.
What was already absurd has become yet more of a stupid stretch. And in ways that hit at the core of AD. For decades they have ranted that the Van Allen Radiation Belt discovered by the first American satellites. Ranging from 400 to 36000 miles up – the moon is 240,000 – all the high energy protons and electrons in the belt whizzing about will kill you if you stick around long enough. Which those heading moonward do not. Getting away from Earth orbit requires a speed of 25K mph, and the return velocity is about the same, so the cross belt trip tales only a couple of hours each way. Add in some radiation shielding and the round moon trip exposure is under half that allowed for workers in jobs involving radiation exposure (this will become a problem for any making repeat lunar voyages per annum). As a matter of course the Artemis coverage is discussing the radiation issue in a manner that lets people know it is not close to being a show stopper.
Some ADs are going on how the wee Artemis capsule is too small to accommodate 4 for 10 long claustrophobia inducing days – it’s worse than Basic on Jet Blue! Which just helps show how desperate they are. As is the claim that the multi-billion, 2600 tonne SLS rocket that put out brilliant flames generating 8.8 million libs of booming thrust is actually nothing more than a cheapo balloon that fooled the thousands of credulous space buffs who eyewitnessed the launch at the Cape. A less glaringly inane contention has been that the upcoming lunar landings will require many more rockets than the Apollo missions, plus refueling, so the latter could not have been the real deal. Intended for extended stays by large teams intended to setting up permanent bases, the Artemis landers are about ten times as heavy as the cute little adorable Apollo LEMs that were for quickie two man stays. Not involving a landing, the Artemis II excursion is using about the same fuel load as the similar Apollo 8.
Most ADs are good with the heliocentric theory and modern physics even if they don’t always get some of the important details. For instance, how inertia caused the American flags when being planted seem to “wave” on the “airless” moon, or how the standard camera settings on the brilliant sunlit moon surface kept the dim stars from being in the pic. Their investment in AD is not a core premise of a radical worldview. For many of ADs the ongoing moon missions may overwhelm their relatively superficial conspiracy theory. All the more so if the Chinese join in the moon, and then Mars or bust, race.
The FE ADs are in the main a heretical geocentric fringe set of hardcore fundamentalist Biblical creationists (run-of-the-ill creationists and organizations reject FE as too wacky even for them) who believe the heliocentric lying BS is part of a super duper conspiracy to convince the inhabitants of what is an obviously level planet that God free natural laws rather than divine will rule creation. They not only deny we would have spent billions back in the day to spend a few days walking and driving on our satellite. They think the moon is an object or projection on the firmament that is, oh, about 30 miles across a few thousand miles up there, and we cannot get to it no way no how. Artificial satellites up to the International Space Station are a clever myth, and those useless booster launches are part of the Great Grand Plot. That said, they may be in trouble too. In late 2024 the Final Experiment disproved a central premise of FE they held to for decades -- that regular folk are banned from going to Antarctica, and those who are allowed because they are part of the heliocentric scheme well know that the sun does not circle around the entire sky in summer. It always being to the north according to the modern FE disc map. The Final Experiment proved both premises wrong. It seems to have had some impact on FE adherents leading to some losses, including a FE who went on the trip. Repeat moon missions and if they come to pass bases are likely to further erode FE opinion over time.
Well, one can hope so:)