... best of all, it has a rebuttal to Fox's 'Moon Conspiracy.' :-D

http://www.sciam.com/2001/0601issue/0601skeptic.html

Fox's Flapdoodle
Tabloid television offers a lesson in uncritical thinking

By MICHAEL SHERMER

'The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech. It is a cost worth bearing, but it does become exasperating, as when the Fox Broadcasting Company aired its highly advertised special "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" NASA, viewers were told, faked the Apollo missions on a movie set.

'Such flummery should not warrant a response, but in a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism—the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong. The Fox show is a case study, starting with its disclaimer: "The following program deals with a controversial subject. The theories expressed are not the only possible explanation. Viewers are invited to make a judgment based on all available information." That information, of course, was not provided, so let's refute Fox's argument point by point in case the statistic at the top of the show—that 20 percent of Americans believe we never went to the moon—is accurate.

'Claim: Shadows in the photographs taken on the moon reveal two sources of light. Given that the sun is the only source of light in the sky, the extra "fill" light must come from studio spotlights. Answer: Setting aside the inane assumption that NASA and its co-conspirators were too incogitant to have thought of this, there are actually three sources of light: the sun, the earth (reflecting the sun) and the moon itself, which acts as a powerful reflector, particularly when you are standing on it.

'Claim: The American flag was observed "waving" in the airless environment of the moon. Answer: The flag waved only while the astronaut fiddled with it.

'Claim: No blast crater is evident underneath the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). Answer: The moon is covered by only a couple of inches of dust, beneath which is a solid surface that would not be affected by the blast of the engine.

'Claim: When the top half of the LEM took off from the moon, there was no visible rocket exhaust. The LEM instead leaped off its base as though yanked up by cables. Answer: First, the footage clearly shows that there was quite a blast, as dust and other particles go flying. Second, without an oxygen-rich atmosphere, there is no fuel to generate a rocket-nozzle flame tail.

'Claim: The LEM simulator used by astronauts for practice was obviously unstable—Neil Armstrong barely escaped with his life when his simulator crashed. The real LEM was much larger and heavier and thus impossible to land. Answer: Practice makes perfect, and these guys practiced. A bicycle is inherently unstable, too, until you learn to ride it. Also, the moon's gravity is only one sixth that of the earth's, so the LEM's weight was less destabilizing.

'Claim: No stars show in the sky in the photographs and films from the moon. Answer: Stars don't routinely appear in photography shot on the earth, either. They are simply too faint. To shoot stars in the night sky, even on the moon, you need to use long exposures.

'The no-moonie mongers go on and on in this vein, weaving narratives that include the "murder" of astronauts and pilots in accidents, including Gus Grissom in the Apollo 1 fire before he was about to go public with the hoax. Like most people with conspiracy theories, the landing naysayers have no positive supporting evidence, only allegations of cover-ups. I once asked G. Gordon Liddy (who should know) about conspiracies. He quoted Poor Richard's Almanack: "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead." To think that thousands of NASA scientists would keep their mouths shut for years is risible rubbish.'

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The Author

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and the author of How We Believe and The Borderlands of Science.

http://www.sciam.com/2001/0601issue/0601scicit4.html

'Later this summer, or perhaps in early autumn, a small pilotless plane will rise into the clear air over southern California's desert salt flats on its maiden flight. From all appearances, the new aircraft will look similar to the many other unmanned vehicles that have soared into the sky on solo spy missions and scientific surveys in recent years. This robotic airplane, however, will differ significantly from its predecessors. Rather than toting surveillance cameras and radars, it will carry "smart" bombs and missiles, should the system eventually be deployed in the field. Moreover, this new unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) is designed to fly for the most part autonomously, in squadrons that will sweep over heavily defended battle zones in waves making coordinated ground strikes.

'The first of a new generation of pilotless attack aircraft, the X-45A is one of a pair built by Boeing Phantom Works in St. Louis as part of a $131-million program sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Though strictly a technology demonstrator, the Boeing aircraft is designed to meet real requirements for hazardous combat missions in which airplanes fly directly into the teeth of surface-to-air missile batteries. If the concept proves itself in flight tests planned for the next two years, production UCAVs could be in the air by around 2010....'

http://www.sciam.com/2001/0601issue/0601scicit3.html

'... The disk, the halo—astronomers thought that was all. Over the years, though, and especially in the past decade, they have found strange patterns in the halo: anomalously young stars, stars separated by vast distances yet flying in formation, even entire galaxies embedded within. As for the disk, astronomers have given up talking about "the" disk. There is a thin disk, at least one thick disk and maybe a so-called protodisk—stacked like layers of an Oreo cookie. This mess of a galaxy must have taken shape over time rather than in one fell swoop, as once thought.

'This past January one of the ongoing digs, the 2dF Old Stellar Populations Survey, delved into the origins of the thick disk. Rosemary F. G. Wyse of Johns Hopkins University and her colleagues mapped 1,500 sunlike stars located outside the thin disk. Two thirds looked like the usual halo or thick-disk stars. The rest, however, had half the expected amount of orbital angular momentum—in fact, a value characteristic of the Milky Way's small satellite galaxies.

'The results argue for an 1980s-era theory that the thick disk arose when the Milky Way devoured one of its satellites. In the process, whatever stars were around at the time got stirred up, puffing the thin disk into the thick disk. Interstellar gas presumably got stirred up, too, but gas (unlike stars) can easily dissipate energy and settle back into a thin disk. Subsequent generations of stars, forged from this gas, constitute the thin disk we see today. A corollary is that no sizable mergers have occurred since the thick disk took shape an estimated 12 billion years ago, although more modest mergers continue to the present day.

'Other surveys have focused on the solar neighborhood. Halo and thick-disk stars occasionally pass through, moving at conspicuously high velocities relative to the sun. A whole new breed of interloper has recently emerged: very cool, very dim, very old white dwarf stars. In March, Ben R. Oppenheimer of the University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues reported 38 white dwarfs within 480 light-years of the sun. "This population may trace the oldest building blocks of the galaxy," says Rodrigo A. Ibata of Strasbourg Observatory, who has conducted similar surveys. Unfortunately, astroarchaeology has a tragic flaw: it does not pin down the full three-dimensional distribution of objects. An intense debate has erupted over whether the skulking dwarfs are part of the halo, thin disk, thick disk or putative protodisk. Similarly, astronomers dispute whether shards from galactic mergers account for the whole halo or just a small part of it. Depending on how these issues shake out, the newly discovered populations could explain the results of dark-matter surveys over the past decade—which hinted at undetected bodies but could not identify them—and thereby complete the inventory of ordinary matter in the galaxy.

'That still leaves the extraordinary matter, the cold dark matter, which seems to make up its own, far vaster halo. Galaxies ruled by it should grow the same way that planets do: from the agglomeration of smaller units. The layering of the Milky Way bears that out. On the other hand, cold-dark-matter theories have trouble explaining the inferred number of satellite mergers, the shape of stellar streams and the rate of disk formation. Whatever the fate of this or that theory, astronomers' perspective on our home galaxy has fundamentally changed. They have come to see it not as a thing, sculpted long ago and left for us to admire, so much as a place, an arena where empires of stars rise and fall over the course of cosmic time.'

NIGEL C. HAMBLY University of Edinburgh; SIMON T. HODGKIN University of Cambridge