Follow-up on Mike Bara's dishonesty

James Concannon writes:

        We don't need to go back 15 years to what Mike Bara wrote in Who Mourns For Apollo to understand how dishonest he was on last week's ep of Truth Behind the Moon Landing. In a book he wrote just last year, he copy/pasted the same text as this blog cited on 3rd June, and added this:

"NASA spent millions to develop the necessary technology to insure [sic] that the astronuats that went to the Moon were protected from the the physical threats of deep space and they were monitored at all times with dosimeters while travelling to and from the Moon. So the notion that the Van Allen belts would have turned the astronauts to crispy critters is simply false."

--Ancient Aliens and JFK (2018), p.183

        So his pretense to be a Van Allen skeptic for the purposes of television production exposes him as a charlatan (technically, the reverse of a charlatan—an anti-charlatan, perhaps), willing to say anything a tv producer asks just for the thrill of being seen. Pathetic.

Review of "Truth Behind the Moon Landing" S1E1

        The first of six eps of Truth Behind the Moon Landing (Science Chan) went on the air last night. It featured Mike Bara as one of three supposedly clued-up gents investigating whether the Apollo 11 landing really happened. Bara was billed as a "former aerospace consultant", which is a bit of a stretch considering that his experience in aerospace was as a contract CAD-CAM technician, with Arrowhead Products.

        The other two gents were NASA astronaut Leland Melvin (STS-122, STS-129) and former FBI agent Chad Jenkins. The three charged around the country (Portland, Seattle, Florida, Washington DC) in search of witnesses who could clear up some of the doubts that have been expressed about Apollo. This engendered far too many shots of our intrepid lads driving cars as they talked about space history.

Long-cancelled military projects
        First up was Clyde Lewis, whose dodgy opinions I wrote about last April in "Clyde Lewis: Ignorant speculator".  Lewis is a radio host in Portland OR, and Bara/Melvin interviewed him in his studio. As I wrote in the April piece, he went way out on a limb about secret military space ops. Here he re-iterated the fairly well-known facts about Project Horizon, and we saw (too briefly) all the declassified drawings and other artwork. But what in the name of all that's holy does this have to do with Apollo? Given that Horizon was cancelled in 1959 just as NASA was born, and long before any plans for a manned lunar landing were made, I'd say the answer is "nothing at all".

Paperclip Nazis
        What next? Oh, a long, long segment about Operation Paperclip—the US government scheme to swipe all the best German rocket scientists at the end of WW2 before the Russians could get them. It was a stunning success, netting around 1,600 rocket boffins, among whom Wernher Von Braun and Kurt Debus are the best known. The Science Channel investigators went off to Florida to interview Linda Hunt, who as a journalist (not to be confused with the distinguished actress) wrote extensively about Paperclip. Hunt declared "They covered up the Nazi past of these scientists", which as far as I know is not true. I think the very term "paperclip" came from the fact that a note about their service to the Third Reich was attached by paperclip to their immigration papers. The point was to waive restrictions on immigration by possible war criminals (NOTE: No paperclip scientist was ever convicted of war crimes).

        All this apparently came as fresh news to astronaut Leland Melvin, for he said "It's really hard to come to terms with that". Again, though, I have to ask what this has to do with Apollo? Chad Jenkins had a brave attempt to connect Paperclip to Apollo by stating "It shows what our government was willing to overlook in order to get to the Moon". I LOLd at that, because at that point the USA hadn't even put a satellite in Earth orbit—manned lunar landings weren't yet on anyone's To-Do list.

Van Allen radiation
        Finally, almost half way through the show, we got some material that was actually relevant to the questions about Apollo. The investigators confronted head on the question "Could Apollo astronauts have got through the Van Allen radiation belts unscathed?" They went to the Seattle Museum of Flight, where the actual Apollo 11 Command Module is on display, and measured the thickness of the shielding with a Lidar device. Then it was off to the Carnegie Institiute for Science for some experiments.

        Dr. Michael Walter took them through the science of the question, showing that even plexiglass attenuates alpha particles by about 50%, and about 3mm of aluminum is pretty good shielding against both alpha- and beta-particles. Walter also made the point that Apollo was free to select the least dangerous path though the belts, and make sure the astronauts were exposed to potentially harmful radiation for the minimum time.

        This sequence was quite good, and at the end of it, Mike Bara said "It changed my mind. It seems it was possible to go through the Van Allen belts." At that I didn't just LOL but LMFAO. Bara was completely faking skepticism about Apollo. Fifteen years ago, in an essay titled Who Mourns for Apollo, Bara wrote this:

"[T]he scientists working on the problem of Van Allen radiation considered it to be minor compared to other design hurdles to be conquered. Their solution was simple -- avoid exposure by keeping the spacecraft at low Earth orbit altitudes while in parking orbits and then send it through the belts at high speed. The eventual escape speed, some 25,000 miles per hour, would have passed them through the belts in less than an hour, keeping their dose well below 1 rad. There was a modicum of shielding from the equipment, but in the end this was not necessary as the extraordinary transition speed kept the dose below harmful limits -- both going to and returing from the Moon."

         So for Bara to now go on television and proclaim that he had doubts about the Van Allen passage should have brought on a severe case of Pants on Fire. It remains to be seen whether he'll keep up this totally fake attitude for the rest of the series.

Update 1:
        In S1E4, Mike Bara came across as a right moron as he continued his daft pretense. He faked not understanding why there are no stars visible in Apollo still photographs. In Who Mourns For Apollo?, the same Mike Bara wrote this:

"Anyone with the slightest knowledge of photography can easily put this one to rest. Any brightly lit foreground object must be photographed with a very short exposure time. Otherwise, the image will be badly overexposed. Any background pinpoint light sources -- like, say, stars that are literally trillions of miles further away -- will not show up at all."

Update 2:
        The overriding theme of S1E5 was the race between USA and USSR to see who could build the biggst moon rocket. Melvin, Jenkins & Bara visited an abandoned facility in the Florida Everglades which was once the development site of a biggie solid rocket when "Direct Ascent" was the plan. The script makes it sound as though Von Braun's competing design of the multi-stage, liquid-fuelled Saturn V was a brilliant new idea. It was brilliant all right, but new? I remind the scriptwriters that Von Braun was also the designer of the Juno rocket that launched USA's first satellite back in January 1958, long before any detailed plan for a manned Moon landing was in place. Juno was 4-stage, mixed liquid and solid motors.

        In March 1959, Juno took Pioneer 4 all the way to the Moon

"Truth Behind the Moon Landing" was produced for Big Fish Entertainment by Mick Kaczorowski, David Bruinooge and Steve Bronstein.

Apollo denial on Coast to Coast AM

        Say what you like about Richard Hoagland, Mike Bara and Robert Morningstar, but at least they aren't Moon landing deniers. So, by all logic, they can't be blamed for the fact that some people are. OK, many people are. It makes me sad to report that, but it's a fact.

        However, I'd like to suggest here that in an indirect sense they are responsible for the spreading virus that is belief that Apollo was faked. The very fact that Hoagland, Bara and Morningstar ram home the message that NASA is a deceptive and untrustworthy agency feeds that mind-set even if they don't themselves believe it. If you don't believe me, read the Encyclopedia of American loons. The entry for Mike Bara alleges that he believes the moonlanding was a hoax. Hoagland's entry says, correctly, that he thinks NASA itself started the Apollo denial ball rolling. The encyclopedia is wrong about Bara, but it's an understandable mistake in the sense that whoever wrote the article felt that Bara was so obviously a doctrinal NASA hater that he surely must disbelieve Apollo.

Not from the Moon
        These thoughts came to me as I reviewed Marcus Allen's guest spot on Coast to Coast AM last Saturday night. Allen is a British photographer who publishes Nexus Magazine-- a source of "alternative, overlooked and under-reported news." His schtick on Apollo is that examination of the 5,777 70mm still photos from the Moon missions proves that these images were not shot on the Moon at all, but back on Earth during training simulations. I must say that considering he was given three hours to make his case he was remarkably unconvincing. His major points have already been well answered by clavius.org among other debunkery.

photo credit: NASA

         Allen cites the above photo of Buzz Aldrin as "impossible" because Aldrin is in shadow, therefore there had to be a source of foreground light. He's not the first to grossly underestimate the intensity of the back-scatter from the bright lunar regolith.^{note 1} And then, think about what's immediately behind the camera—an astronaut in a white suit in full sunlight. Very effective as a fill light.

        He complains that the Hasselblad photos are too good to be the work of amateur photographers under stress and hampered by heavy gloves. The composition and exposure of the photo-set, he says, are virtually perfect. Allen doesn't seem to understand that many of the images were adjusted to be suitable for general release. Such adjustments quite often included re-framing.^{note 2} However, there's not much that the labs could do about images like this:

photo credit: NASA (Apollo 17)

        Perfect exposure? I don't think so. Allen also thinks photography would be impossible in the temperature extremes on the Moon-- a contention that clavius.org has taken care of.

        When it comes to the moving pictures, Allen's criticisms are even more dismal. He maintains that the bouncing or hopping gait that lunar gravity forced on the astronauts was simply simulated by over-cranking film. The TV show Mythbusters tried that and showed that it couldn't be done. Besides, there were many, many such sequences that were television rather than film, and seen live around the world in real time. You can't over-crank reality. There are other moving images, too, that could not possibly have been obtained on Earth. Apollo 15's hammer and feather stunt... the big "rooster tail" of lunar dirt thrown up behind the Apollo 16 lunar roving vehicle... one requiring a perfect vacuum, the other requiring one-sixth g.

        How, then, does Mr. Marcus Allen say the photographic evidence of Apollo was obtained? Ignoring the above examples, he says it was all created in a studio, in advance, during training. He says it wasn't necessary to keep this enterprise secret because the technicians involved were openly creating training and simulation materials. What they didn't realize was that their work would later be misrepresented as having been carried out by astronauts on the Moon. He doesn't, apparently, wonder why these photographers and crews don't ever yell that their work was mis-labeled.

        It seemed to me that Allen allowed the possibility that the Apollo landings did indeed happen, but only the photography was faked. That, of course, is nonsensical. He's saying that the Apollo astronauts were sent to the Moon with photographic equipment that was useless. AND THEY DID THIS NOT ONCE BUT SIX TIMES. Marcus Allen, go to your room.

Brookings
        There's another reason why I think Hoagland, Bara, and Morningstar have to take some blame for all this bad information. Late in the third hour, host Richard Syrett asked about possible cover-up of alien structures in the Apollo photography. Allen replied that it would not be surprising, since the Brookings Report strongly advised NASA to STFU about any evidence it might find of extraterrestrial intelligence. Well, this contention is totally untrue, and it's all the fault of Hoagland/Bara/Morningstar that the rumor is widely believed. Hoagland started it, and Bara/Morningstar vigorously espouse it. It's the only way they can answer the obvious question "Why would NASA be shy about announcing something that would do them nothing but good?"

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[1] He stated that the albedo of the lunar regolith is typically 7%. Actually, it's a bit more than twice that.
[2] See, for example, this account of how NASA PR messed with a very famous photograph.