One Small Step For A Man

I was born just three months after Alan Sheppard's 1961 sub-orbital Mercury flight, and six months before John Glenn's orbital flight in 1962.

Due to Cold War propaganda, I knew precious little about Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human to orbit the Earth a full three months before Sheppard's ballistic shot.  Nor was I aware of Alexei Leonov's historic EVA in 1965, until years later.

I was born with the Space Age and my life and hobbies have been intricately tied to this epoch in history.  I have fostered a life-long interest in astronomy and aerospace, studying the topics both independently and at university.  I can recite facts and figures about the Universe that would induce narcolepsy in most normal humans.

During the Apollo 11 mission, I absorbed every second of broadcast time, getting exhilarated every time I saw fellow Houstonian Walter Cronkite's visage appear on the fuzzy black-and-white cathode-ray tube, futzing with the rabbit ears to draw in the clearest possible picture of the events as they unfolded.  It was a very rare occasion that my strict parents let me stay up late, glued to the TeeVee (but not too close as it would ruin my eyes).

Perhaps it was my youthful naivete, or my willing suspension of disbelief, or my indoctrination into the Cult of American Greatness, or perhaps a bit of all three that led me to unquestioningly accept everything I saw.  It would be decades until I started critically examining the Moon landings.

Being an expert in optics, lighting, set construction, special effects, and film production in general, I take most of the photographic theories with a grain of salt.  I think Stanley Kubrick was far too careful to make simple mistakes (wink).  I do think a good number of the iconic Moon photos were staged, but that does not a priori rule out actual landings.

My suspicions are centered much more on the technology.  There are some serious and fact-based questions that have never been adequately addressed by NASA, nor satisfactorily answered by Apollogists (pun intended).

There are two issues in particular that have long puzzled me, and the NASA documentation is vague and dodgy.  There have never been any clear explanations for these two issues and some of the design data are still classified.  The first is how the astronauts' backpacks exchanged heat in a vacuum, and the other is the Aerozine 50 fuel used in the descent and ascent stages of the Landing Module (LM).

The first of these mysteries is the Primary Life Support System, or PLSS, which are the bulky backpacks worn by the moon-walking astronauts.  Among the many functions of a PLSS - radio, CO2 scrubbers, micro-meteor protection, insulation, humidity control, etc. - was the removal of internal and external heat and exchange it with the environment.

One may think this is a simple and straightforward process, and inside an atmosphere, one would be right.  We must recall, however, that the Moon has no atmosphere.  We are told repeatedly by NASA and other agencies that the surface is a perfect vacuum in which the entire Universe sucks on any object exposed to it.  While this presents a number of issues with the moonsuits and lander construction, we will focus on the heat exchange.

Anyone familiar with the function of a Thermos will instantly appreciate the problem of exchanging heat with a vacuum.  In a Thermos, an inner glass container is held in a vacuum enclosed by an outer container, which prevents heat from being lost to the surrounding environment.  Because there is no medium of transfer, i.e. air, to dissipate heat to the environment, hot liquids inside the Thermos retain heat.  Simple concept, but presents unique challenges for astronauts on the Moon.

Not only is the astronaut's body generating heat, which gets uncomfortable rather quickly if not vented, the astronaut would quick cook when exposed to direct sunlight on the Moon.  Any surface on the Moon reaches up to 250F in direct contact with sunlight on the Moon.  The moonsuits are not immune to this, even given the bright white reflective materials.  Inside, the astronaut is generating heat, both at rest and especially when working.

The solution was a form-fitting body stocking (LCVG) infused with tiny capillaries circulating cool water to a heat collector inside the backpack.  The heat exchangers then "vent" the heat into the vacuum by sublimation.  This presents a number of major issues.

The astronauts must carry to the Moon a large amount of water to be wasted by sublimating the waste water.  This process will take some time inside the PLSS endangering electronic systems, or it must be sprayed directly into the environment creating clouds of ice crystals and/or steam that can blind the astronauts' visors (among other problems).

Sublimation is the process of a solid converting directly to gas without a liquid state.  To watch sublimation at home, get a piece of dry ice and place it on the kitchen counter.  Note the time and watch how long it takes for the ice to sublimate.

It's a similar problem with water ice in the PLSS on the Moon.  For one thing, a large chunk of ice must be stored somewhere while it sublimates.  There's an additional problem in that water ice at temperatures below -200F is as hard as rock and apparently does not sublimate quickly, since Mars has large amounts of water all over the place, and a number of moons in the solar system are composed entirely of water ice.

If the water ice in the PLSS is not thrown away somehow, then it will melt (presumably) inside the PLSS and the LM, causing all sorts of issues with the electronics, not to mention a slip-and-fall hazard.  Since we never saw the astronauts helping each other get rid of ice balls in their packs, we must assume sublimation was not the means by which waste heat was expelled.

Since footage from the Moon never showed clouds of vapor spraying into the environment from the suits, and any collected inside the PLSSs would melt and cause problems inside the LM, we cannot fathom how the heat was exchanged with the environment.  After all, a vacuum is a critical component of a Thermos, which retains heat.  All of the available documentation either leads the reader in a circular argument, or waves the problems away with vague statements.

The second problem concerning the fuel for the descent and ascent stages of the LM is even bigger.  There is no dodging the issue with hand-waving and circular arguments.  The available documentation simply ignores this issue altogether.

The LM used a hypergolic binary fuel (self-oxydizing and ignites the moment to two liquids come in contact with each other) called Aerozine 50.  There are so many problems with this fuel that it is almost never used for human spaceflight.  In fact, the Apollo program is the only one I can find that used it for a manned mission.

Correction 27 July 2019 - Aerozine 50 was used on the Titan GLV rockets in the Gemini program that preceded Apollo.  A number of modifications were made to make it human-rated.  This fact, however, does not change the concerns and issues mentioned here.

Aerozine 50 combines a form of hydrazine with dinitrogentetroxide as an oxydizer to create a highly explosive fuel with a very high specific impulse.  An accident in 1980 punctured a hydrazine tank on an ICBM missile and the explosion lifted a 750-ton silo door right off, while launching the second stage and nuclear warhead out of the silo.

In addition, hydrazine freezes at 38F/2C, and the shade on the Moon is -250F.  None of the available specifications mention the ability to lower the freezing point to -250F.  Aerozine 50 is a special mixture that does lower the freezing point a bit, but certainly not anywhere near the temperatures found in space or on the Moon.

Hydrazine is highly caustic and will eat through many common materials, such as mylar sheeting, Kevlar spacesuits, etc.  The descent would have spewed vast amounts of highly caustic and poisonous exhaust  all over the landing sites.  This not only would have contaminated any rock and soil samples they collected making them scientifically useless, but would have been carried inside the LM, thus poisoning the astronauts and eating away at the electronics and air scrubbers if it didn't eat through the suits first.

While all of these issues are problematic, at best, the most obvious problem is that burning Aerozine 50 creates thick clouds of red smoke and bright flame, even in a vacuum (self-oxydizing).  In an airless environment like the Moon, this smoke would completely surround the landing sites and take a significant amount of time to dissipate.

To sum all this up, the Aerozine 50 fuel used to land and take off from the Moon placed two astronauts on top of highly caustic and explosive liquids that would have required very intricate heating systems to stay liquid.  The landing would have created a thick cloud of smoke that should have taken days or more to dissipate, leaving the astronauts blind visually and photographically.

Finally, the specific impulse of the Aerozine 50 means that the astronauts would have been pinned to the floor of the LM on launch (they were free-standing) for at least several seconds until acceleration peaked.

It should be noted that there is some discussion whether the ascent engine was powerful enough to lift the weight of the craft, men and samples.  These arguments are generally inconclusive because the weight data is not consistent or not complete, and in some cases, the specifications of the engine are in doubt.

The PLSS cooling system and Aerozine 50 fuel not only have a number of direct issues, there are dozens if not hundreds of ancillary and corollary problems introduced by these two things alone.

If we assume, as I do, that humans have indeed walked on the Moon, then we are faced with either or both of two possibilities: 1) the events did not occur as publicly acknowledged, and/or 2) technologies were employed that are not public knowledge.

These are just two of a number of glaring problems with the Apollo missions.  Other include the vacuum on the Moon and the construction of the LM and moonsuits, micro-meteor bombardment, weight of supplies and equipment versus the power of engine designs, and many more.

All of these issues are highlighted by the fact that humans have not (publicly) returned to the Moon in 50 years and apparently lack of engineering capability at NASA and other agencies to overcome the inherent problems of a return trip to the Moon.

While I have no desire to diminish the achievements of gutsy and talented individuals, there is some underlying reason why America has not be back to the Moon for 50 years, and why the Soviet Union (and later Russia) abruptly cancelled its plans after achieving nearly 90% of the tasks to get there.

History tells us that humans do not suddenly abandon or "lose" radical new technologies without compelling reasons.  It is not a "conspiracy theory" to question the existing facts.  Something has stopped humanity from following in those tentative first steps, at least openly.  Those of us who paid for those steps certainly deserve more than we have received.

One other solution presents itself: everything we have been told about the Moon's environment is false.
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Update 28 July 2019 (Anonymous Comment)
 With regard to IR radiation being the means by which heat is released into a vacuum, this is true HOWEVER:

The heated surfaces must be exposed to the vacuum in order for the heat to radiate away.  The astronauts and their PLSSs were highly insulated internally and externally.  Since they were not wearing mirrors, they were not perfect reflectors, therefore the amount of heat put into the system was over unity with the amount released through IR.

Diagrams of the PLSS show it being entirely enclosed, thus the IR would build up inside and damage critical circuits and machinery, thus killing the astronaut.  Furthermore, the sweat collected off the astronaut would have to be stored somehow, or released somehow.  There is no evidence of either solution being used.  AND the circulated cooling water would have to BE COOLED somehow, which comes right back to the heat release mechanism.  As I mentioned, the whole thing is a circular argument with dozens of corollary and ancillary issues.

No matter how you slice this problem, you always end up with more heat in the system than it can radiate away, especially considering all possible outlets for IR were insulted and unable to radiate heat away.

With regard to local time on the Moon, the Apollo missions were timed to land in the Moon's local morning, which may reduce heat problems, but increased cold problems.  No matter how you frame this argument, you end up with dead astronauts - whether by boiling or freezing.

As for thermal camera images, I have never found any from the Apollo landings, so difficult for either side to cite such things.  In any event, the IR reflected off of exposed surfaces would make the thermal images useless in this argument.

If water ice sublimates at extremely low temperatures, why aren't Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, Pluto, Charon, and other bodies composed of water ice not sublimating away - even in direct sunlight, and in some cases inside the highly radioactive magnetic field of Jupiter? After billions of years (theoretically), these primarily water ice bodies should be nothing but tiny balls of rock.  These moons and planets should be shrouded in steam as the surface ice sublimates.

Sublimation is sublimation, whether it's dry ice or water ice at 1,013.25 mbars and 25C, or more, or less.  That was the point, not whether or when CO2 exists as a liquid.

As for specific impulse, yes it is similar to octane ratings, but not exactly the same.  Regardless, if you are standing in the back of a pickup with nothing to hold on to and the driver floors the accelerator, does it really matter how much octane the fuel has when you fly out the back end and hit the tarmac?

Hypergolic fuel was ostensibly used because the engines are simple and reliable, but that does not address ANY of the other problems caused by using it.  One tiny pin-prick in the hydrazine tank - with micro-meteor threat and hypersonic dust particles accelerated by the exhaust - and there wouldn't be much left to collect in a bread box.  This is a huge amount of risk to take on a program that was so vital to US propaganda efforts.

Furthermore, this does not address the fact that the hydrazine would be frozen solid at -250F,thus useless as a propellant without a whole infrastructure to heat the tanks that would suck valuable battery life away from all the other critical systems.  Even if Aerozine 50's freezing point were magically lowered to -100F (which it wasn't), one is STILL 150F below that.  Again, a circular argument with no published sufficient remedies.

All of these issues get exponentially more problematic as surface times increase from hours to days in subsequent missions.  To put it as simply as possible, no amount of hand-waving and conditional language eliminates all of the problems.  Yes, they COULD have done a lot of things, but the available documentation is insufficient to answer the questions raised.

Selling A Bridge In Brooklyn

I am increasingly coming to the opinion that most of what we know about the Apollo Moon landings is a fraud.  This is not to say that I am convinced no one went to the Moon, only that the public spectacle was staged all or in part.

As soon as I was able to rationally take apart an argument, say around 12 or 13 years old, I began to question certain aspects of the Apollo landings.  There were things that didn't make sense, or were at least unclear, such as how the "moonsuits" exchanged heat in a vacuum.

I dismissed most of this as idle speculation.  Being a child of the 60s, I practically idolized astronauts and voraciously consumed every tidbit that escaped the NASA PR machine.  It was all so amazing and exciting.  Yet, it was the PR aspects and the amazement generated that eventually led me to question what I had seen even more deeply.

As I grew older, I developed a very healthy and abiding distrust of anything a government said or did.  There was the constant finger-pointing at Soviet media with the mantra that it was all propaganda.  If the Soviets could do it, I reasoned, so could the US.  Further study of Leni Riefenstahl's films for the Nazi regime

I came to the conclusion that all mass media was little more than cheerleading for whatever government it served.  When I read the theories of Edward Bernays, and the ability of media to influence behavior and beliefs, I began to see the mechanics of the media in action every time I sat in front of the TeeVee.

Once I began my career in media, I not only saw, but learned how to do it and made a decent living doing it.  However, the better I go at it, the less I consumed it, and finally, the more I questioned anything I had ever seen in the media.

And that, despite my early indoctrination - especially through the space program - led me to carefully research any and all assumptions I made, figuring a vast amount of my beliefs were pounded into my brain through the media.

Ultimately, I have been forced to give up one of my sacred cows: the belief that everything the public was told about the space program and the Moon landings was false from top to bottom.

I haven't given up my conclusion that someone went to the Moon, but the story and images we were fed in the public were primarily fabricated for mass consumption.  The strongest argument in favor of this view is simply that the US could not afford to fail because, 1) the amount of money spent had to be justified to the public with results, 2) the geopolitical war for hearts and minds against the Soviet Union had to be won, and 3) a strong cover story for the real space program had to be concocted .

The Apollo program consumed US$29.3 billion by 1972, when the program was cancelled.  That would be well over US$120 billion today.  Furthermore, the public goal of reaching the Moon by 1969, combined with the massive pressure to defeat the Soviets in the propaganda wars would have made a successful landing mandatory.  An accident would have delayed the program at least a year, as the Apollo 1 fire did, and a failure to meet the public goals would have meant Congressional hearings and investigations into where all that money went.

The Cold War was one of pure ideology.  A Soviet success, particularly the "first-evers", was a major defeat for the Capitalists.  If the Soviets were perceived to have a better system than the West by dint of their technological wizardry, it was seen as a defeat for the "free" world which obviously could not compete.  This was seen as dangerous for its ability to attract other nations into the Soviet sphere of influence.  This was unthinkable in the US weltanschauung.

In the end, though, the public space program was a necessary cover for the real space program.  Showing the public the "current" state-of-the-art in space travel made for plausible denial of the much more exciting, but highly secretive technology in use by the "dark" programs.

It is a fact publicly acknowledged that NASA operated two space programs.  On the one side were the "space planes" like the X-15 that were close to achieving orbit (if they hadn't already).  On the other hand, there was the rocket program that was less elegant and more brutish, but if everyone believed that was the only way to get "out there", then the US' enemies would put all their efforts into building their own rockets, rather than competing with simple and reusable planes.

The cover story aspect also explains why the public space programs of the world have not progressed beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) in the last 50 years.  Despite the fact that space technology was born practically overnight in historical terms, it has virtually stalled in the last half-century.  By convincing the public that rockets were the "only" answer to achieving orbit, no one would believe that more advanced and exotic propulsion existed, and would keep the world focused in the wrong direction while the real tech was developed.

Once we accept that three very powerful motivations existed to falsify the public record, then everything else becomes suspect.  Money, humiliation and ideological failure would make any government seriously consider falsifying huge events, since it is well established that swallowing huge lies is much easier than small ones, as we have clearly seen with the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks, which provide historical bookends to the Apollo program.

Having decided that the public spectacle of Apollo would have had to be faked, due to the tremendous pressures placed on it, then it is only a matter of analyzing the evidence, looking for the "seams" in the fabric.

The are many eloquent and detailed investigations out there that detail all the various evidence for fakery. Everything from the laws of physics to photographic retouching have been put forward.  The only response from NASA is either silence or a condescending snicker at the "absurdity" of such a thing.  However, neither of these responses is an answer, only a dismissal.

Certainly, the behavior of the 12 men who comprised the faces of the "Man on the Moon," is telling in its own right.  The public and private statements and actions from Gus Grissom and Neil Armstrong to Ed Mitchell and Pete Conrad do little to allay suspicions, and in some cases appear to purposely increase them.

As for NASA, they have done little but present some fuzzy orbital photos of the "landing" sites and have dared the world to set foot near those sites.  That sounds more like an agency covering something up, rather than celebrating a magnificent triumph.

If you still cling to the fantasy of NASA's Apollo program, then consider this: the RS-18 ascent rocket used on the return part of the lander produced 3,500 pound-feet of thrust using Aerozine-50 fuel with N2O4 oxidizer in a hypergolic reaction.  The engine had no throttle.  The astronauts stood at their stations with no support of any kind.

When that RS-18 rocket lit up, the astronauts would have been flattened against the floor for at least a few seconds during acceleration.    Furthermore, Aerozine-50 and N2O4 produce thick red clouds of exhaust when combined.  Watch any of the videos showing the LM launching from the Moon and listen to the audio, as well.  The astronauts are not flattened against the floor.  In fact, they don't even grunt trying to resist the force of acceleration.  Nor do the ascent videos show any sign of thick red smoke, or even exhaust of any kind.

I have very little doubt that people have been and continue to go to the Moon.  However, I find little convincing evidence that the Apollo program that the public was fed had anything to do with the events they purport to document.

Unraveling the Apollo Lie is the first step in trying to figure out what is really going on in space.  I imagine the answer is likely far more mind-blowing than most of us are ready to accept all at once.

Got Yer Chang-e Hangin'

"Beijing, Iridium base here, the Jade Rabbit has landed!"

The Chinese are to be congratulated.  They have made the first soft landing on the Moon in nearly 40 years, and have now joined a very exclusive club of three nations to have done so (that we know of, at any rate).

At about 6:30 this morning Jakarta time, the Chang-e craft settled down in the Bay of Rainbows just northwest of the Sea of Rain.  If you're looking for it from down here, it's the right eye of the "man in the moon".  Interestingly, this is roughly the same area where in 1970, the Russians landed Luna 17 with Lunokhod (Moonwalker) 1, the first rover to successfully operate on another heavenly body.  The Chinese rover being named "Jade Rabbit" is also appropriate, since they have always seen a "rabbit in the moon", rather than the western "man".

This singular event may start a new age of exploration, led not by the US and USSR superpowers, but rather by new powers that have only emerged in the decades since the Great Space Race.  We can only hope that this new age will be one motivated by peaceful intentions and not military, though comments by certain leading Chinese in their space program belie an intent to seek the high ground of military advantage.

Like the exploration of the New World, led by the Italians and Portuguese, but colonized by the Spanish, French and English, the new age of space exploration may go into history books as being led by the US and USSR, but colonized by the Chinese, Indians and Iranians.  Much remains to be written on that account, though.

What the Chang-e may do in the near term is force the US hand in revealing much of their hidden space program, long speculated by researchers like Hoagland, Dolan and Farrell.  It will become increasingly difficult to hide things when disinterested third parties are poking around with HD cameras and rovers.  The Japanese could be controlled, but the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, and the new Russia less so.

For far too long, NASA has dominated the amount and content of information being disseminated from space exploration.  When unchallenged, this control gets out of hand, just like state secrets and surveillance.  Competition from up-and-coming space powers means that the monopoly is about to come to a crashing halt.

Will it mean that we the people will start getting more truth?  A bit, maybe.  More likely, secrets will be used in smoke-filled back rooms to bluff and cajole in trade and finance negotiations.  It does, however, create a lot more holes in the dike to plug, and leaks are more likely to occur when spread over a larger area of political landscape.

The sheer volume of information fed back to NASA by its probes ensures that there are many things we the people don't know.  NASA's unwillingness to share unadulterated information with the general public was unchallengeable when there were precious few alternative outlets.

Chang-e 3 and little Jade Rabbit have changed that, and more are likely to follow.  What happens when cultures whose creationism is seasoned by Hinduism and Buddhism, discover evidence of ancient high civilizations?  Will they be more likely to release that intel, because their religious and philosophical histories are not threatened by this knowledge, but are actually vindicated?

The US and USSR are, despite all outward appearances and marketing, fundamentally christian nations with certain beliefs and narratives flavoring their collective weltanschauungs.  China is fundamentally Taoist/Buddhist, which evolved out of the Indian Hindu traditions that plainly describe ancient high-tech civilizations.  Here we have a cultural underpinning of reincarnation and ancient advanced societies.  Does that forebode a greater likelihood of certain information coming out?  Time will tell, but their foundational beliefs would be less threatened then the Judeo-Christian narrative.

In any case, the Chang-e 3 and Jade Rabbit are game-changers.  Whatever is "up there" will now belong to a larger club, whose members are moving away from a strict Western, Judeo-Christian underpinning.  This subtle difference may not seem important in the greater scheme of things, but it predisposes the players to a much different view of the Universe and Man's place in it.  That bit of difference in philosophical predisposition makes for some interesting speculations on likely outcomes.

Meanwhile, in Rainbow Bay, just off the northwest corner of the Rain Sea, fresh tracks are being laid in a renewed Age of Space.  Where those tracks will lead is anyone's guess, but the foundation is laid for a very interesting future.

To The Moon, Alice!

How would you like to enjoy one of the greatest mysteries in the known Universe?

It's possible for you to look directly at it with your own eyes.  You can see it nearly every night of the year.  People write songs and poems about it.  It figures into all of our legends and myths.  And it's one of the most mysterious things we've ever encountered.

Isaac Newton, father of calculus, creator of the Three Laws of Motion, guru of gravity, and the original Apple dude, said that he could explain the motions of the entire known Universe, except for the Moon.  Isaac Asimov, creator of the Three Laws of Robotics and all-around great sci-fi writer, said there was no greater mystery than the Moon.  And with all our super-computers and space telescopes and even having walked around up there, we still can't figure it out.

Bet you thought the Moon was the least of our problems, didn't you?

Just so you know, I have had a deep and abiding interest in astronomy and manned space exploration since I can remember.  I studied astrophysics under Dr. Larry Pinske at the University of Houston and brought home straight As.  So I know a little bit about these things.  I can tell you that all the self-assured statements about where the Moon came from are not worth the hot air they are made with.

The prevailing dogma at the Church of Our Lady of Know-It-All, is that the Moon was formed when an 'extra' Mars crashed into Earth, and the resulting rubble pile coalesced into the Moon, roughly 4 billion years ago.  All fine and good, except no one seems to be able to explain how an 'extra' Mars was flying around loose defying all of Kepler's Laws of Orbital Dynamics.

The idea is that the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and we get that number because that's the oldest rock we've ever found on Earth.  One teeny-weeny little problem: some of the rocks the astronauts brought back from the Moon are a billion years older than that, AND the dirt they were sitting on is a billion years older than that!  AAANNNDDD, some of the rocks don't match the general composition of the Moon or the Earth, meaning they don't come from either.

"Oh, pshaw," you say, "The astronauts didn't go to the Moon.  It was all faked by Stanley Kubrik at Disney Studios."

Well, remember Dr. Pinke?  He did studies on the astronauts helmets.  There were microscopic pits and spikes inside the helmets made by cosmic rays striking the material.  The astronauts all complained of transient flashes of light INSIDE their eyeballs, which later was confirmed to be cosmic rays striking small particles inside the liquid of the eyes.  Also, a number of the moon-walkers have died of rare cancers.  All of these data points add up to men who have been outside the van Allen radiation belts.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that PARTS of the Moon transmissions were faked by Stanley, though, to cover the times when the astronauts were messing with things we aren't allowed to know about.

There's many other problems, too.

You know those dark areas on the face of the Moon, called maria, right?  Unlike much of the rest of the Moon, they are composed of a titanium alloy, and dead in the center of each one is a nearly-perfectly round, 20-mile deep object called a 'mascon,' or mass concentration.  Absolutely no explanation for those.  They are large enough that if you stood on the edge of Mare Tranquilitus (where Apollo 11 landed) and dropped a plumb-bob, it would stand several degrees off plumb due to the gravitational pull of the mascon.

The astronauts left a bunch of expensive equipment all over the place, among which were seismographs.  They measure, naturally, Moon-quakes.  Just to get some readings, NASA crashed a lot of stuff into the Moon, like left-over craft and rocket parts.  Guess what?  The Moon rings like a bell when you hit it.  One particular instance occured when Apollo 13's third stage hit the Moon, causing it to ring for several hours.

Oh, and it turns out that the Moon is really hard, too.  The astronauts had a hell of a time trying to get core samples.  One, I don't remember who, nearly fell down trying to turn the drill.  Related to that is the fact that none of the Moon's craters are deeper than 3 kilometers, despite being hit with some pretty big 'somethings.'  So, even big pieces of 'space stuff' can't get very deep into the surface.

One of my favorites is that the Moon dust brought back has lots of little iron balls in it.  That's not necessarily weird, but the fact that they don't rust is.  There's also a bunch of elements and compounds that are vanishingly rare on Earth, including iridium and uranium-237.  Sure, we can make it in the lab, but lying around on the ground?  That's a toughie.

In general terms, the Moon is 1/4 the size of Earth, which is pretty damn big, as moons go.  It also happens to be the exact right size and in the exact right orbit to have nearly the exact same apparent size as the Sun, so we get things like solar eclipses.  The chances of that happening completely by random chance are, well, virtually nil.

The Moon is also in a near-perfect circular orbit almost exactly over the Earth's equator, even though the Earth is tilted 23-degrees to the side.  Again, don't bother calculating the odds on that, since most calculators don't have that many places right of the decimal.

Few people remember this, but when the astronauts went to the Moon, there was concern that they would sink in the dust that had accumulated on the surface of the Moon over the billions of years it had sat there.  "Scientists" did all these calculations and came up with the idea that there should be at least a couple of feet of powder on the surface.  Well, guess what?  There was only inches, meaning the Moon was either far younger than anyone thought, or some other force had been in play.

Another interesting tid-bit...when the US and USSR were fighting to be the first to get to the Moon, both sides kept missing.  Their toys either flew off into the Great Unknown, or they smacked into the Moon.  Now, orbital dynamics were pretty well established by Isaac Newton.  In fact, Newton could have orbited the Moon if rocketry had been advanced enough.  So why did all that hardware keep missing?

Werner von Braun let that cat out of the bag in an interview with Life Magazine.  He told us that the Moon's center of gravity was not at the center of the Moon, but quite a bit further out, meaning that the Moon's gravity well started about 5,000 miles sooner than anyone expected.  That can play hell with your trans-orbital insertions, bub.  Interestingly, about two weeks after von Braun let that out, he was 'retired' and all the toys on both sides started getting to the Moon with no problem.  Hmmm...

There's plenty more: transient gas releases from certain craters, water vapor clouds floating around, magnetized rocks on a planet with no magnetic field.  The list goes on.  And here's the problem...none of these things fit any of the theories, or can be explained by any 'natural' means, at least that 'scientists' are willing to entertain at the moment.

The Moon is, in fact, one of the greatest mysteries in physics, astronomy and chemistry.  There's a lot of posturing by 'scientists,' like they've got it all sussed, but in fact they don't have a clue.  The Moon is nothing like the Earth in composition, is much older than Earth by any measurements we have taken, and has characteristics that don't match any other natural phenomenon we have observed to date.  It shouldn't exist is about all anyone can truly conclude, if they are honest and weight the facts, not their personal pipe dreams or the paradigm currently being paid for by grants from the National Science Foundation.

Not to mention that something about the Moon scared the hell out of NASA, and they haven't been back in 40 years.  Don't believe a word of all that 'budget' crap.  For what they've spent on space stations and shuttles and interplanetary robots, they could've built a small city on the Moon with regular tourist runs each month.  Hell, it's only three days away by 60s technology, using computing power that didn't come close to your smart phone today.

The conspiracy theory is not the facts that I have laid out.  NASA has published the information, though they hide it pretty well.  The conspiracy is the truth about the Moon and why humans haven't been back there in 40 years.

It's a great puzzle, a real mystery, in our own back yard.  Some of the greatest minds in history have stubbed their toes on it, and the honest ones have admitted it.  It literally stares us in the face every night, and yet almost no one in the 'establishment' will touch it.  They'd rather send an endless series of rock-sniffing golf carts to Mars and call it a major step in science, than deal with the real head-scratcher slapping us upside the head.

Ain't it about time we started getting some real science, and real answers, for all those billions of dollars we keep shooting into space?  If not, then can't we put that money to better use down here?