The miscellaneous musings of Rasa Viharii
In amongst the “smoking guns” Rasa’s so fond of, he makes a lot of other claims. Here are some of them. They were originally part of another page, but he was hogging the limelight. It’s too long to add here, but check out the bottom of this page to see where he mistakes a pond for a building.
This idiot a) thinks this is an Apollo astronaut’s description. It isn’t, as he should know because he got it here and b) doesn’t know that Starry Night is a piece of astronomy software.
The description’s wrong, it was actually taken some time after LOI, as detailed here.
He compounds his error later by saying this:
“ in a later interview, Neil Armstrong said, "we couldn't see any stars from cis-
Nope. He never said that.
The same user (who claims to work for the CNSA but really doesn’t) claims to have worked out that the sun angles for Apollo, and says Apollo 12’s is all wrong.
Well, he had no need to work out, they’re all here.
Apollo 12 may have had a sun elevation of 18.6 degrees when they left for home, but when that photo was taken during EVA-
Our favourite fake pretend scientist is at it again, this time making a number of claims about the stations used to track Apollo.
He’s absolutely right about the MSFN and DSN, they were actually a thing and did good work. He’s also correct about the Soviet equivalent. The ESA one, not so much. The ESA, and its ESTRACK network, wasn’t founded until 1975. It’s predecessor the European Space Research Organisation was founded in 1964, and did launch some some satellites, but nothing that would have been any use to Apollo.
The claim that they were all in cahoots, particularly an organisation that didn’t exist, is just a fantasy he needs to prop his delusion.
Then there’s the idea that they were top secret facilities manned by the military.
Nope, wrong again. Some stations did have military personnel, but many were manned by a variety of civilian contract staff. This National Geographic edition describes how:
“"travelling teachers, a chaplain, even an island hopping barber"
would service the stations, along with employees of companies like Bendix, Boeing and RCA.
This article by a self-
“high-
and himself as:
“Fresh out of school and possessing a near-
Certainly not a member of the military. You can look at Tananarive here to see how very military it isn’t.
This Spanish tracking station director talks about being the
“interface between the NASA station management and the local Spanish contractor employees”
and describes himself as a “contractor”. Again, no mention of the military.
Likewise the staff at Australia’s tracking stations at Honeysuckle Creek, made famous in the film ‘The Dish’.
Yes, NASA used the military, why wouldn’t it? The tracking stations of many countries were, however, run by civilian agencies just like NASA, and were not top secret or off limits to non-
The poster in question needs this secret military network to exist in order to prop up his fantasy. The reality is that the signals from Apollo spacecraft came from the moon, not orbiting craft that would have required a constant handover to the next station. Far from being “in on the hoax”, the staff at these stations were immensely proud of being involved, like Don Kovalchik:
“I cherished my role; I'd helped NASA maneuver satellites, talk to astronauts, and retrieve untold gigabytes of scientific data.”
Or Valeriano Claros-
“the astronauts were just getting ready to exit the lunar lander when I finished [my shift], so there was no way I was going home”
Another combination of poor research and delusional fantasy colliding to try and re-
Click here to look at some of my tracking station memorabilia.
Aww look, it’s everyone’s favourite canteen cleaner in China again.
First off, he fails to disclose the actual causes of failure of the probes he mentions. India’s Vikram probe failed after its braking thrusters malfunctioned 4.5 miles up. Israel’s Beresheet suffered multiple malfunctions, not least of which was the engine shutting down thanks to the way they chose to fix other errors. Japan’s privately funded Hakuto lander ran out of fuel. None of these have anything to do with dust or exhaust plumes.
As for his claim that Apollo’s landers didn’t create any exhaust plumes oir kick up dust during landing, well firstly, he has no idea about the plumes as they weren’t filmed. It matters not, you don’t need a rocket to produce a visible flame in order for it to work.
Secondly, maybe he missed the famous “picking up a little dust” comment during Apollo 11’s landing, or the videos taken by 16mm cameras of the other missions that clearly show exactly that: dust being sent off in a way that couldn’t be done on Earth. The videos below show the landing footage for all Apollo missions, all showing streams of dust being blown horizontally by the engine exhaust that he claims isn’t there.
As for blast craters, it’s a common obsession with hoaxnuts. They don’t get that if it was firing hard enough to gouge out a huge hole, the descent engine would just fire the LM back into space. All the missions show discoloured, denuded surfaces immediately below the engine bell.
It’s kind of ironic that a Chinese lander is illustrating his post, because the landing footage from those landers (also given below) shows dust behaving exactly as it does in the Apollo footage, shows no visible exhaust and no blast craters.
Oops.
In a later reply, he acknowledges the dust plumes created by China’s lander, but it’s not quite the dust storm he imagines. While that article quotes scientists as saying
“LADEE also has the potential to measure dust that might be lofted above the lunar surface by the Chang'e 3 touchdown”
And that China’s probe might consequently have an impact on LADEE’s results, reports after the event found that
“Surprisingly, the LADEE science teams' preliminary evaluation of the data has not revealed any effects that can be attributed to Chang'e 3”
Oops. Again.
Another one from everyone’s favourite pretend space worker. This time he’s showing his ignorance on yet another area of the missions.
He’s deriding a post criticising one of his supposed ‘12 smoking guns’ (below right), a piece of Apollo 15 footage from the LRV deployment.
First off, there’s no suggestion anywhere that the astronaut is tethered in any way -
His main error here, however, is his dismissal of the idea that tethers were ever used.
Thanks to diligent research and looking into actual facts, it is well known that Armstrong was tethered to the lunar module as he made his first step. The tether in question was the Lunar Equipment Conveyor, the line used to transfer things to and form the lunar surface, but which was initially used to keep Armstrong attached just in case something went terribly wrong.
It can be made out in TV footage and is even shown in training photos.
He’s back, and this time he’s claiming that the figure standing at the rear of the rover in these 4 photos at station 1 on Apollo 17’s first EVA is a dummy, and that it doesn’t move at all, not one single bit, in this panorama taken by Jack Schmitt. He acknowledges that there are differences, but it can only possibly be due to camera movement, not astronaut.
Well, if that’s the case, if we get Photoshop to align the 4 photos, there should be a consistent movement with everything else, right?
Seems not!
Pay particular attention to what’s visible in the visor -
He is, quite simply, seeing what he wants to see, not what’s actually there.
Rasa is fond of citing Lunokhod as an example of how retroreflectors can be on the moon, claiming that they are an example of how they can be ‘placed’ there (somehow ignoring the fact the the mirrors are built into the Soviet rover and that their exact location was a mystery for years until they were found again by the LRO). That’s not what this post is about though -
They aren’t stars, they’re faults in the image. If they’re stars, you’d have no problem making the constellations out, and you wouldn’t also see them all over the lunar surface, and the rover’s landing vehicle (see left).
He’s also a little confused about the rover’s structure.
The “strange-
The shape to which he’s referring is part of the rover, but isn’t the solar array (that was out of shot) -
Finally, it’s not from a digital camera -
As always, his posts sound good to people who have no idea what he’s talking about. Sadly, neither does he.
Oh hey look, it’s 脚放在嘴里(or ‘foot in mouth’), yet again.
There’s a couple of things in this post that need addressing.
Firstly, the panels are not held on with Velcro. I have found one reference to that being the case other than the comment on that image, and it’s here. Note it’s not a NASA page, it’s a forum for space enthusiasts. Weirdly, the exact words used in that thread appear on that image, but that image is not used in the forum post (which, tellingly, he does not reference). He made it himself.
The panels were actually secured by rivets and were attached when inside the Saturn V stack at the last minute to allow people to work on the LM. The rivets on the obviously damaged LM panel are clearly visible (see below). The only conceivable use of Velcro here would be to attach the panels in a confined workspace before the rivets were used. The pattern of the damage itself reflects the positions of the rivets.
Secondly, this is very obviously not an ‘official’ response, as foot in mouth well knows. It’s something he does all the time -
NASA do not dignify hoax claims with responses. They have better things to do with their time than pacify morons, and do not need to arrange their activities to appease ill-
This respondent to a facebook post thinks there’s something fishy about the lunar module descent stage photographed by Chandrayaan-
All he had to do was to find some stills of the TV footage taken after the ascent module returned to orbit and he’d have known what the ‘antennae’ were: RCS plume deflectors.
He could even have done some amateur photoshopping himself and compressed the elongated shadow to prove that the antennae are simply part of the remaining descent stage structure, like this on the right.
Naturally old foot in mouth weighs in with his view, shown on the right. He doubles down on it in a later post (see below).
I’m going to make this simple Rasa: this version of events is a lie.
You made it up. It’s false. It’s a complete fabrication and you know it, and you have no more evidence of this being true than you have of working for the CNSA. You’re a liar and a deluded fantasist conning your sycophants into believing you’re some kind of insider whistleblowing authority. You’re nothing of the sort.
Here’s the actual sequence of events: India released (for want of a better word) low resolution images of Apollo 11 and 12 in a web presentation in June 2021, and again for Apollo 11 in a different web presentation in September 2021. In early 2022 the high resolution versions of the landing sites were simultaneously released (without any kind of fanfare) on the Chandrayaan-
I know for a fact they were released simultaneously because I check there for new files daily. As a result, I was one of the first people to download and process those images and get them out publicly.
The XML data for the raw files show very clearly that the files were made at the same time for the website from original images taken three days apart.
Here are the two presentations compared -
It’s a little weird that the Apollo 12 image, complete with labelled footprints and equipment labels, was available at the same time as the Apollo 11 one in June, which completely contradicts Rasa’s version of events. Almost as if he’s completely and utterly wrong about everything.
Jarrah White makes lots of insinuations that these files were downloaded via NASA facilities, but he has no proof of it. Can we be certain? Why yes, yes we can.
The filenames here end in ‘D18’. If we look at the user guide for OHRC products, we see the key shown on the left. D18 is India’s DSN facility in Bangalore.
In fact, of the 94 OHRC files (47 pairs of raw and calibrated data), none went through the USA. Of 10202 (to date) lower resolution TMC files, 224 of them went via NASA, with each photographic target having between 2 and 6 raw and calibrated images. 40 TMC files went via Canberra.
So no, these two files were not routed through NASA, very few them were. Even if they were, there is absolutely no proof that they modified the files in any way, or encouraged India to do so. It’s desperate, dishonest straw-
He’s the gift that keeps on giving. Rasa (who claims his old facebook account was deleted by ‘them’ -
He posts several annotated images, claiming that the probe uses a telescopic arm, which is visible in the Surveyor photos but not the Apollo 12 ones. The best one is below’.
One of his acolytes points out that that really how scissor arms work, but he doubles down on it, insisting that it is a “telescopic tube”.
He posts this photo of what Apollo 12’s view of Surveyor looks like, and there is a seemingly very thin connection to the scoop.
So, what gives?
As usual, the answer’s very simple. The “Analysis of Surveyor 3 material” report (I own an original) clearly describes the “retraction tape” that controlled the sampler arm -
If you zoom in close enough, you can make out those same markings, and it’s even more obviously a tape, not a tube.
While the one above (about 1:25 in) shows more of the scoop in action, where the tape starts off thin side on, but gets wider (with measuring marks) as it moves downwards.
The first few seconds of this video (below) show the tape in action, and it is very thin!
In an addition to the facebook thread, Todd (also known as the ‘Conspiracy Dentist’ on youtube), tries his very best to enlighten Rasa about the steel band (right), even supplying another photo showing the complete twin-
As you can see, he’s having none of it, he’s decided that the black bands on the surveyor image are the joints of a telescopic arm and no amount of explanations and evidence will convince him otherwise. The fact that if it was telescopic it would get thinner near the end, yet it doesn’t, has also escaped him.
We can get even more supporting evidence from Surveyor 7, which has exactly the same design. Here’s a photo from the mission report, (my own copy).
Here’s a close up of that tape from my own copy of the Surveyor 3 preliminary report. It’s pretty obviously a thin piece of tape, with regular markers to measure its extension. If only there were some Apollo images that showed s similar thing. Like AS12-
They describe the process of collecting the scoop in the mission report, specifically mentioning the steel tape:
It gets worse. Despite his followers posting pictures like this (below left) and this youtube video compiled from surveyor images (stills from which are shown below centre and right).
This one even shows the shadow from side on.
But despite all that, Rasa says…
So there we have it, the reason it looks like a thin wire has nothing to do with it being a thin wire and everything to to with it being a tape used to pull the scissor arm in and out. The reason it looks thin is the viewing angle, it’s not a telescopic tube, and Rasa has once again shown that he has the observational ability of a blind mole-
There’s doubling down, and there’s doubling down squared -
And no, Rasa, no-
Even if they did hide them, there are plenty of original copies of them around, like the ones I own. Rasa knows this, because the link he posts there is the same one I’ve just added describing the digitisation process.
It happens all the time, Don Petit’s throwaway quote about ‘Destroying the technology’ to get back to the moon (my emphasis) gets transformed into “destroyed everything to do with the Apollo landings ever.
This, however, is a flat out lie.
No: Northrop Grumman said no such thing. Paper copies of originals still exist, like the beauties below listed at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
We also have this public archive of thousands of scans -
So while there may not be many originals floating around, there are certainly digital copies.
Oh, and notice the watermark in Rasa’s photo? It’s a replica copy available at all your favourite online retailers. His “engineer rescue” story is just more deluded fantasy. He has no idea of that image’s provenance, or even if it’s a genuine blueprint.
Try again, Rasa.
Shadow shit show
This is a regular claim that Rasa makes, and it betrays his ignorance of the Tranquility Base site and how shadows work on uneven surfaces. He doubles down on it by making claims about light sources with converging rays (bear in mind this guy claims he’s a physicist of some sort), which is just nonsense.
The video in question is from here, and is shot on 16mm film from the LM window.
Yes indeed, one shadow is longer than the other, but it but look at the shadow of the flagpole:
It’s bent, not straight, because it’s falling into a depression, just as Armstrong’s shadow is. That is the primary cause of the shadow length being different -
You can also see the uneven ground in the surface photos, and in those taken by orbital probes (this is from Chandrayaan-
You don’t need to re-