Rene-NASA-Mooned-America

Every Shot — A Hole In One / Chap. 8 p. 68
Michael Collins, the navigator on Apollo 11, waxed ecstatic when he claimed: "On the
return trip, the atmospheric "re-entry corridor" or zone of survivability, or whatever you
wanted to call it, was only forty miles thick, and hitting a forty-mile target from 230,000
miles is like trying to split a human hair with a razor blade thrown from a distance of twenty
feet. Granted, the primary responsibility for keeping the razor blade aimed precisely toward
the absolute center of the hair would be the job of powerful ground tracking radars, coupled
to gigantic computer complexes... The key to it would involve measuring the angle between
a selected star and the moon's or earth's horizon, but how accurately could this be done" 1
Ostensibly, on the outwardbound trip, our Earth based radar would have had a distance
reading on the capsule until it was out of range. That distance was surely much less than
10,000 miles. After that only a radar transponder could accurately give its distance almost all
the way to the Moon. However, even with a transponder, nothing we had then, or have now,
could have given Houston an accurate bearing. Without that, all that could have been known
was that the ship was somewhere at the base of a large, rapidly expanding cone.
The power of a radar transmitter to hit the Moon is not in dispute here. Collins noted,
"As early as 1963, the DSIF had bounced a radar signal off the planet Mercury, over 60
million miles away, so we weren't too concerned about its power, but its accuracy was of
vital concern to those of us who would be navigating with its help." 2
Real accuracy of bearing, for space navigation, is something that radar didn't possess,
doesn't possess, and never will possess. A radar beam simply spreads too much for the exact
accuracy required by space navigation. Even light spreads. If you take a powerful flashlight
with a 3-inch parabolic reflector and shine it at your feet, the spot of light is almost the same
diameter as the lens itself. Shine it across the street and the beam has spread to 24 inches. It
spreads even though the reason for the imperfect parabolic reflector is to keep the light rays
as parallel as possible. The same imperfections apply to radars.
Yet the Apollo 10 carrying John Young, Tom Stafford, and Eugene Cernan was allegedly
tracked by radar as they came around from the back side of the Moon, after the LEM
had separated from the command capsule. Peter Bond said "... the Madrid tracking station
picked up two craft flying in formation as they rounded the east limb of the moon." 3
Most of us think that a laser beam is a coherent beam of absolutelly parallel light rays. It
is coherent but the parallel part is not precisely true. Even laser light spreads slightly.
According to Richard Lewis, one of Neil Armstrong's jobs was to set up a 17.9-inch square
laser reflector on the Moon so that we would know within 75 meters the distance of the
Moon. When the Earth laser was "Aimed and fired through the telescopes, the laser beam
made a splash of red light on the Moon about 2 miles in diameter encompassing the mirror."
4
Working out the trig, we find that the each edge of the beam dispersed .000239°. 5 If such
a test was actually made, a reflector could have been placed on the Moon by a probe just the
same way that Surveyor III was landed. This practical demonstration shows that neither
beam, light, nor radio waves, consists of parallel beams. In fact, current radar beams have a
horizontal beam width that ranges from .65 to 2°and a vertical width from 15
NASA MOONED AMERICA! / Rene