A bit more than ten years ago I was studying the 911 case and the Holocaust death toll. One of my colleagues asked if I think the Americans went to the Moon. Apparently people who are interested on one conspiracy theory are expected to believe in all conspiracy theories. At that time I had just briefly looked at the evidence for the claims. There were some photos and videos of people jumping with the help of suspenders pretending to be weightless and the claim was that the Moon landing films were made that way in some studio. I answered to my colleague that some photos seem a bit too good to be accidental shots. Probably they retouched them, like the one where another astronaut is seen in the visor, but otherwise, I did not see any reason to doubt the official story.
And so it stayed for all these years, but in the April Fools Day editor Ron Unz of the Unz Review published an article written by a moon landing skeptic, so I looked at the issue.
It is not so that if a person has verifies that there was the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, which incidentally is quite well documented from the 19th century, and has tracked the later moves of these people, it would automatically follow that the person believes in all crazy conspiracies. But it is good that somebody who is not paranoiac takes a close look also at such less probable conspiracies.
I did verify with a back-of-on-envelope calculation that even though the moon lander looks so small and the rocket needed on the Earth is so big, it is quite possible that the moon lander could land and take off from the Moon. It is because the gravitation is so much smaller and maybe also because there is no atmosphere. I do not see it as a major obstacle that a few astronauts did the landing and take off and managed to lock to the command module on the Moon orbit. Such can be done, though admittedly, there often are problems. But the astronauts did have some small problems.
There is also no unsolved problem with coldness and heat: as astronauts have been in the space on Low Earth Orbits (LEO), they can survive in the space with the equipment and suits that there are.
But there is one issue that makes me doubt that the Apollo flights went to the Moon. It is connected with the Van Allen Belts (VAB). It is not that a manned spaceship cannot pass Van Allen Belts. It certainly can, provided that it has adequate radiation protection. The problem is that Apollo spaceships did not have any planned radiation protection. The spaceships did protect against radiation to some unknown extent. Therefore it is possible that these spaceships did pass the VABs and the announced dosage figures for Apollo flights are correct. But this radiation protection was not planned. NASA planned and installed heat protection to the spaceships, so there is a heat shield, and there are other structures that can and do give some level of radiation protection, but if you try to look for the radiation shielding of Apollo, you will soon find out that nobody knows what level of protection it gave. I find this very odd. NASA knew that Apollo flights would have to pass the VABs and that the VABs were deadly for an unprotected spaceship. They sent the Moon missions on live television to the whole world. And yet we are supposed to believe that they did not plan a stage of the mission going through a part of space that they knew had a deadly level of radiation. Especially odd this is because they also knew that they can pass the VABs safely provided that they add radiation shielding, so it was not any technical obstacle. Yet, they did not plan any radiation shielding and even today nobody knows how well the Apollo command module shields radiation. Why would anybody do such a thing: first you plan carefully every other part of the mission and then ignore one small and potentially deadly piece?
You may say, for sure they planned. They just have not given out information of the radiation protection for some reason or another. I wonder what that reason could have been. The Soviets also knew about VABs and how much radiation there was, so there was nothing to hide in saying that we put 10-30 g/cm2 radiation protection to the spaceship. That is not a state secret. It is just saying that the walls of the command module were 3.7 to 10 cm thick if made of aluminium and thinner if made of steel. NASA has given all information of the heat shield, and these command modules are on display somewhere, so any spy can go there and measure them. Some of the walls are indeed thick. So, there is enough metal to protect against radiation, but the thickness is not equal and this is why it is not known how well the Apollo command modules protect. It is like with a dry suit for diving. They are used for keeping the diver warm in deep sea. Earlier they were made of rubber and the thicker rubber, the better cold shielding. But if somebody put a tractor tier on his waist, then he had more rubber but no coldness protection. Thus, the protection shielding would have to be planned in some way. It is not good just to rely that heat shielding and other structures accidentally protect also against radiation.
Furthermore, it could not have been planned, because experts apparently did not know how much radiation protection was needed. Still in 1991 they did not know it. I found a book by Simonsen in the NASA Technical Report 3079 (Feb.1991):
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sshepherd/research/Shielding/docs/Simonsen_91.pdf
He gives some information. On page 8 states that moderately shielded spacecraft (5 g/cm2), such as those contemplated for advanced missions… This means that Apollo did not have so thick shielding. On page 5 Simonsen states that moderate shielding as 2-5 g/cm2 usually suffices to passing the Van Allen Belts. We can conclude from this NASA report that in 1991 they still believed that 2-5 g/cm2 was sufficient and 5 g/cm2 was only planned for advanced missions. It seems to follow that the Apollo missions used about 2 g/cm2.
This seems to be the understanding of Andreas Märki in
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1805/1805.01643.pdf
Märki calculates the dosage Apollo 11 crew got while passing the VABs along the trajectory of the flight. Then he tries to guess the radiation shielding used from the announced mission dosage, which is 1.8 mGy. Märki gives the shielding as millimeters of aluminium. The density of aluminium is 2.7 g/cm3. Thus 20 mm thick aluminum gives 5.4 g/cm2 and 7 mm gives 1.89 g/cm2. Clearly, he uses the values in Simonsen’s report: 2-5 g/cm2.
First Märki calculates the dosage for shielding by 4 mm aluminium and notices that it gives the mission dosage as 39.6 mGy. That is much higher than the announced 1.9 mGy. Therefore he suggests that the Apollo Command Module may have offered 7 mm protection, that is about 2 g/cm2, the lower bound on Simonsen’s report.
One may wonder why Märki at all considers 4 mm. It is most probably because the shielding is very heterogeneous; 30% of the surface of the Command Module is rated at below 4 g/cm2, 12% is below 3 g/cm2 , see Figure 6 in NASA’s expert R. Turner (2009)
https://three.jsc.nasa.gov/articles/Shielding81109.pdf
We cannot take an average of Turner’s data, like we could not say that an umbrella that has 30% hole makes you 30% wet. It depends on where you are. It is possible that 30% of the places in the Command Module were dangerous. I would probably estimate the shielding level from Turner’s picture to 4 g/cm2.Today NASA says that the Apollo Comman Module is rated as 7-8 g/cm2, that is 26-29 mm of aluminium:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo_astronauts.html
The report also tells that the space suits give 0.25 g/cm2 protection.
The figure 26-29 mm does not match to Marki’s calculations: radiation with so much shielding should have been less than what is announced. It also does not match with the estimate that João Tiago Duarte Sabino uses in his MSc thesis (2012)
https://fenix.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/downloadFile/395144831767/dissertacao.pdf
Sabino thinks that the radiation shielding of Apollo Command Module was 100 mm of aluminium, that is, 27.8 g/cm2. This level of radiation shielding is of course much higher than what NASA claims, 7-8 g/cm2, but by thuis 100 mm shielding Sabino gets in his simulations a very correct mission dosage for Apollo 17. The method and values used in Sabino’s thesis seem very justified and I would conclude that 100 mm shielding is probably close to the value needed for obtaining announced dosages for Apollo flights. Märki gets a lower estimate because he sets to zero radiation in all other stages of the mission. He acknowledges that he derives only a lower bound because in the year 1969 there was radiation outside VABs. Thus, both Märki and Sabino agree that in order to get the mission dosages announced for Apollo flights, the radiation shielding had to be better than 7-8 g/cm2, which is the value NASA today states for Apollo Command Module.
The opinion of R. A. Braeunig in a somewhat older web page can be mentioned:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160608082332/http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/VABraddose.htm”
Braeunig calculates the protection shielding of the Apollo Command Module and first comes up with a figure below 7 g/cm2, but then he adds secondary protection: he thinks that oxygen bottles and measurement devises and all that stuff that there was in the Comman Module could have added another 8 g/cm2 of protection. Together it would be 55 mm of aluminium. It is still less than Sabino’s 100 mm, but it might well be sufficient for getting the announced dosages. It is much above 7 mm that Märki suggested. However, I have a problem in accepting such shielding. It is not shielding the space inside the module. It is only shadowing some parts of it depending on which way the radiation comes. In VABs there are charged particles following a spiral path. It is difficult to say from what direction they come. But naturally it could be so that the radiation detector in the command module was in a shadow of some large metallic object and did not record radiation even if the astronauts absorbed it. If so, then the announced dosages could have been readings from the instrument, yet be totally false. The astronauts would have survived the belts, that is not the question. The question is that the announced dosages indicate a too high radiation shielding and make one doubt if the flights happened at all, but if the dosage is incorrect, it solves the problem.
There has been a recent test flight by unmanned Orion. It touched the inner VAB and got a much higher dosage that what is announced for the Apollo flights. Orion had more radiation protection than Apollo. There is a hobbyist web-page explaining the Orion dosage:
http://www.aulis.com/orion_vanallens.htm
As this site may be a bit on the Moon Hoax side, I do not comment it, but the information on Orion is easy to check from other sites. Apparently the dosage in VAB was relatively high, and Orion did have intentionally built radiation shielding unlike Apollo, where any radiation protection was a side effect of heat shielding.
So, there seems to be a wide range of estimates for radiation shielding of the Apollo Command Module. Nobody seems to know and indeed, a NASA report from Apollo flights from the time they happened says nothing of the shielding used:
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-368/s2ch3.htm
It is possible that they did not use shielding and it is why the Apollo astronauts saw blinding flashes inside their eyes during the mission and then had a much higher probability of suffering from cataracts later in life.
So, that was my main argument why it is not so clear that any Apollo spaceship flew to the Moon. I am sure they could have made it. In order to pass VABs the only thing they needed was enough millimeters of radiation shielding. But there was a more serious issue: the possibility of proton storms. The space suit in the Moon offered almost no radiation protection, neither did the lunar module. Thus, had there been a solar storm associated with a flux of protons, the astronauts in the Moon would have been dead. The probability of such an event is not so small but well in the range any army would easily take. NASA made about 2 trips in a year and in each trip the astronauts were vulnerable to a proton storm for about a week. There were about eight larger solar storms in a year (actually 1971 only two), and about three of them were very strong. Mostly the storms lasted for one day or shorter, but the larger ones would have been deadly.Thus, the chance of hitting any of these eight storms in two weeks in a year is about 8%, and hitting the certainly deadly ones is about 3%. NASA made trips for four years, so we come to about 30% probability that some crew would have either got seriously ill or died of radiation. That is a chance an army could take: any attack on a hill has causalities. But it may not be a risk that public relation people want to take for Moon landings that are shown on television in all countries in the world. You do not want to see the astronauts vomiting or dying in your television, or even hear that after the event many astronauts died. That is bad publicity: the whole goal of showing these Moon landings in the television was to assure the world of American technical superiority, not of their bad planning.
So, that was my worry.
But as I looked as João Tiago Duarte Sabino’s MSc thesis, it is quite interesting
https://fenix.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/downloadFile/395144831767/dissertacao.pdf
He gives a calculation example in Table 5.4, page 41. It shows how to calculate dosages for Apollo 17.
For instance, to get the LEO dosage for this mission, you first notice that the mission was 210 min=1.26*104 s in LEO. Then you add the protected values for Solar Maximum from Table 5.1 for LEO, that is 4.27 for trapped protons and 1.33 for GCR to get 5.6*10-6 mGy/s.
This you multiply with the time 210 min and get
1.26*104*5.6*10-6 mGy=0.07 mGy, which you find as the entry for LEO from table 5.4. The values of Sabino give the mission dosage for Apollo 17 as 5.2 mGy. The annnounced value is 5.5 mGy.
In order to calculate the mission of Apollo 7, which stayed in LEO (but in low LEO orbit) for all the time, we first calculate the time in LEO. it is 10.8 days=9.36*105 s. Then we take the LEO radiation the same way as before, 5.6*10-6 mGy/s and multiply it with the time. This gives 5.6*9.36*105-6 mGy=5.2 mGy. This value is too high. The announced mission dosage is 1.6 mGy. However, the reason is simply that the LEO radiation values in Table 5.1 are given for a higher orbit, for Skylab orbit at 435 km. Correcting this gives the value for Apollo 7 correctly. Sabino’s calculation method and table values are correct when correctly used.
We notice from figures 5.1 and 5.2 that the dosage for voyage stages outside VABs does not much depend on shielding. It is because the radiation is GCR, which passes the shielding. We also notice that if the LEO orbit is lower and has insignificant number of trapped protons, like with the orbit of Apollo 7, then it is irrelevant if you are in the LEO or outside VABs, as long as you do not get flares (solar storms). Thus, the difference in dosage between Apollo 7 and Apollo 11, assuming that Apollo 11 went to the Moon, is only VABs.
The flight of Apollo 11 through VABs lasted 350 min = 2.1*104 s according to R. A. Braeunig
https://web.archive.org/web/20160608082332/http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/VABraddose.htm”
From these we can calculate the dosage in VABs for unprotected flight as
3.75*2.1*105-6+4 mGy =7.875*103 mGy=7,875 mGy.
Here the trapped proton part is so large that GCR is ignorable. From Braeunig we get the dosage for an unprotected flight as 1,442 mGy. The difference between these figures is not especially large and can be explained by different assumptions for radiation and trajectory and a different method. As Sabino’s thesis is written much later and it has been checked, I consider his numbers more correct.
However, the announced mission dosage for Apollo 11 is much smaller. It is 1.8 mGy. Let us assume the spaceship did have the shielding of 27.8 g/cm2. From Table 5.1 we can read the dosage in seconds for VAB in Solar Maximum as (58.91+2.71) *10-6 mGy/s=61.6*10-6 mGy/s. Multiplying this by the time spent in VABs (350 min) yields 2.1*104*61.6*10-6=1.3 mGy.
For the rest of the trip we can assume Apollo 11 has the same daily GCR radiation as Apollo 7, so as Apollo 7 lasted 10.83 days and Apollo 11 8.08 days, the dosage for Apollo 11 should be 8.08/10.83 times the mission dosage for Apollo 7 plus the VAB contribution. This yields
1.6*8.08/10.83+1.3=1.2+1.3=2.5 mGy.
The strange thing is that the announced dosage for Apollo 11 is 1.8 mGy. It means that shielding was much better than what Sabino estimated, or the trajectory was better. Let us assume that the trajectory of Apollo 11 was better and instead of Sabino’s values for VAB we use Braeunig’s value. The unprotected dosage in Braeuning is 1,440 instead of 7.875, that is 1/5.46 part. From Sabino’s figures we got the VAB dosage as 1.3 mGy. Dividing it by 5.46 we get 0.24 mGy for the better trajectory of Apollo 11. Calculating the mission dosage for Apollo 11 gives 1.2+0.24=1.44 mGy. This is a bit smaller than the announced value and we can conclude that Apollo 11 did not quite have the 27.8 g/cm2 shielding.
One can conclude that Sabina’s thesis gives a good calculation method and his figures are quite reasonable when correctly used. Apollo 11 can indeed have had the announced mission dosage. It depends on shielding. Especially one must notice that the argument that Apollo 11 should have had a much higher dosage than Apollo 7 regardless of shielding is false. The difference comes only from VAB and the VAB contribution depends only on shielding.
What is interesting here is that all calculations from Märki, Sabino and Braeunig are rather similar and the differences come from the amount of radiation shielding the Apollo Command Module had. In general, one can calculate the radiation and none of these authors much differ in their methods or results. It is not so that Moon Hoaxers cannot calculate radiation correctly, while the real scientists of NASA and other places can do it. Using any of these references, and I recommend Sabino’s thesis (doing the necessary adaptations of the values in his tables if the orbit is a low LEO or VAB depending on the trajectory, that is, using his method correctly). It has a nice and simple and farily accurate calculation method based on Sabino’s simulations. Such authors as Braeunig first start by insulting the Moon Hoaxers and then try to impress the reader with formulae. At the end you notice that the author does not do the calculations in a way you can check: he says that there are thousands of calculations and he can only give you the result. So, the long post of Braeunig is exactly similar to the short paper by Märki, both give you tables and ask you to believe in them. Neither work is checked. But Sabino’s MSc thesis is checked and based on his simulations, so it is more reliable.