Question about that moon landing conspiracist who spoke at the library

Last Tuesday at the public library downtown, a guy named Greg Ford gave a talk claiming the Apollo 11 footage was filmed in a studio. He pointed to the waving flag and the lack of stars as proof. I don't buy it because NASA engineers in Houston already explained those things with basic physics. Has anyone else heard him speak and caught the part where he said the radiation belts should have killed the astronauts?

3 comments

3 Comments

casey161mo ago

Greg Ford's point about the Van Allen belts actually has some merit if you look at the raw math. The radiation levels are way higher than what the Apollo shielding could handle without some serious extra protection. NASA's explanations about timing and trajectory feel like they're dodging the real question of how the astronauts survived that trip at all.

the_kevin1mo ago

Casey16, you're spot on about the raw math issue. That's the same thing that got me questioning the whole Apollo radiation story after I dug into the numbers myself.

ruby_rivera769d ago

The library's event coordinator told me Greg Ford has been doing this circuit for years, and his Van Allen belts argument is actually the weakest part of his whole presentation. Honestly, I looked up the actual radiation data from the Apollo missions a while back, and the key is that the belts have different density zones, and NASA picked a trajectory that went through the thinnest part of the inner belt for less than two hours. Tbh, the total radiation dose for Apollo 11 was about the same as a few CT scans, not some lethal sci-fi death ray. Ngl, Ford's math ignores that the shielding on the command module was specifically designed to handle those exact particle energies and exposure times. The radiation levels he's quoting are for a stationary satellite stuck in the thickest part of the belt, not a fast-moving spaceship skimming through the edge.