Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

APPALLED AT APOLLO 165
However, you’ll see that some flour was carried farther away
than your breath alone could have blown it. It’s hard to get a good
breeze blowing as far away as your outstretched hand because
your breath can really only go a few dozen centimeters before
petering out. What carries the dust farther than your breath can go
is the air that already exists in the room. You blew air from your
lungs, and that air displaced the air in the room, and it was that air
that carried the flour farther than your breath alone could push it.
However, on the Moon, there is no air. The thrust of the LM
engine was substantial, but it only blew the dust out from directly
beneath it. Some of that dust blew for hundreds of meters, but,
contrary to our experience here on Earth, the dust just outside the
immediate area where the exhaust plume touched down was
largely left alone. Plenty of dust was left there in which to leave
footprints. In reality, a little more dust got blown around than that
because the dust blown around directly by the engine can smack
into other particles of dust, moving them also. So the “hole” in the
dust was bigger than the burn area of the rocket, but not substantially
so. Incidentally, in the tapes of the Apollo 11 landing you
can hear Buzz Aldrin commenting that they were “picking up
some dust” from the engines as they neared the surface. Neil Armstrong,
who piloted the LM, complained that the moving dust
made it hard for him to figure out how fast they were moving
across the surface.
Some hoax-believers also claim that the dust could not keep
footprints because it has no water in it, and you need something
wet to keep it compacted. This is nonsense. Flour is incredibly dry,
yet you can easily leave a footprint in it. This claim is bizarre, and
again I am dumbfounded as to why someone would put it forward
when it is so trivially easy to prove wrong by experiment. In this
case, at least, common sense leads you the right way.
4. The Temperature of the Lunar Surface
Related to the dust problem is that of the Moon’s temperature.
The Apollo missions were made during the day on the Moon. Measurements
of the Moon’s surface show that the temperature can get
as high as 120°C, hot enough to boil water! Hoax-proponents