💾 Archived View for gemini.locrian.zone › misc › bad_tv_removed.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 10:02:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
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This section was excised from Plait’s response to the moon hoax “documentary”, but still remained present as a comment in the code of the web page, so I’ve preserved it here for posterity. Note that this argument is inaccurate by the reckoning of the very man who wrote it.
Two last bits: the engines were designed to cut off a couple of meters above the surface of the Moon to prevent too much dust from kicking up and obscuring the vision of the astronauts. So they actually fell the last little way; that’s yet another reason there is no blast crater. I will note that after reading Armstrong and Aldrin’s account of the landing, the engine may have actually cut off *after* they landed; read the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal account for more; scroll down to 102:45:32.
I have been told by one Dieter Zube, a project engineer for General Dynamics Space Propulsion Systems, that “The Viking landers had three individual thruster that were fired during the landing to provide attitude control during landing, but also to reduce the amount of dust that would be kicked up while landing. In addition, each thruster was a cluster of twenty individual small nozzles, that made it look like an udder. Again, the reason for this to avoid a high pressure exhaust plume, to avoid stirring up the ground. Main reason for this design was to avoid a big cloud of dust, which would settle on the delicate sensor surfaces and camera lenses as well as the microbiological sensors trying to look for life on Mars.” So I would guess was aware of the dust problem both in and out of an atmosphere.