User:ZooGuard/Sandbox/Siegfried Marquardt

Siegfried Marquardt is an obscure German Apollo landing denier. Unlike his better known brethren, he doesn't have a website, or even a YouTube channel. Instead, he engages in the Internet equivalent of pasting handwritten signs at bus stops: he has a standard text that he likes to copy on pages that mention Apollo - on the talk pages of wiki articles, in the comment sections of blogs and other websites, etc. - but he doesn't stick around to defend his ideas.

He came to our attention in January 2014, when he inserted the latest iteration of his "arguments" in RationalWiki article about that conspiracy theory. The same text has been posted around the same time on other sites, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, the comment section of Universe Today (since deleted) and random astronomy blogs. It's also easy to find it in the original German. This is not Marquardt's first such posting spree - in the autumn of 2013, he posted an earlier version of the same text on several pages at the English-laguage version of Wikipedia. His activity on Wikipedia continued also in February.

Blog comments in German - in April and May, new arguments added? http://atonal1.blog.de/2011/05/10/apollo-11-astronaut-buzz-aldrin-bestaetigt-ufo-begleitete-apollo-11-mond-11127900/#c19982370

This article is mainly a dissection of the text he tried to add to the Moon landing hoax article and its talk page.

Background
At it at least since 2009, if not earlier.

"Refutation of Apollo 11 on the basis of the fuel balance for the start and flight trajectory"
This is the text with which he tried to, ahem, enrich Rational Wiki. All of the titles in quotes are his. The "chapter" numbers have been stripped, as they correspond to the sub-section numbers. The text appears to be a bad machine translation from German, probably made with Google Translate, so it's been occasionally patched with the German original. Given the formatting, the original is probably a text-processor document and copy/pasting it into plain text wrought havoc on tables and mathematical formulas. Most of the formulas have been rewritten in LaTeX for clarity; the rest of the text is mostly in its original form, except for some formatting to improve presentation. Significant clarifying edits are marked.

"Representation of NASA for launch of Apollo 11 in the cosmos"


Right from the start the text raises a red flag, using Wikipedia as representative of the "NASA version".

Straw man: imprecise description from Wikipedia, not NASA

It reveals his ignorance of the actual mission profile. What was put in low Earth orbit was a whole "stack" - the Apollo Command/Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM) were still atop the third stage of the Saturn V, the The S-IVB was required to give the Apollo craft their final kick towards the Moon, a second engine burn performing Trans-Lunar Injection. The LM was stowed in the Lunar Module Adapter, a compartment between the CSM and the S-IVB stage itself. The TLI burn was followed by what NASA called the CSM moved forward, the Adapter's side panels split like flower petals, revealing the LM, the CSM turned around, docked to the LM and then pulled it out of the Adapter. Marquardt apparently thinks that only the CSM and the LM were delivered into orbit - a rather big research failure, given that even Apollo 13, an effing Hollywood movie, got that right.

"The first Cosmic velocity of about vB=7,9 km/s"
In this and the following sections, Marquardt tries to calculate the maximal theoretical delta-V - "change of velocity" - that could be produced by the Saturn/Apollo stack and compare it to the delta-V allegedly necessary for various orbits. The first section deals with achieving Earth orbit.

Explain first/second/third "cosmic velocity" here. Robert Braeunig did it better http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/saturnV.htm

Actual numbers here.

Sub-indexes: MTr from "Treibstoff" - fuel/propellant Fw from "Widerstand" - resistance

No idea what are (3), (4), (5) - perhaps he's trying to calculate the losses from Earth's gravity. The air resistance calculation seems to be missing the drag coefficient, implicitly assuming a coefficient of 1. In reality, a body's drag coefficient is not constant - it depends on the body's shape and speed. Has the factors negative affecting delta-V, but misses the Earth rotation bonus.

"conclusions"
S-IVB mistake again.

"Flight time, speed, and cosmic radiation"
Exact duration

Without finding Sternfeld's book (presumably the Künstliche Erdsatelliten mentioned below, originally published in Russian as Искусственные спутники Земли, "Artificial satellites of the Earth", in 1956 or 1958), it's impossible to know whether Marquardt is representing correctly what Sternfeld wrote. It's possible that Sternfeld has given a few example trajectories and Marquardt is interpreting them as the only possible trajectories. Sternfeld has published books after the Apollo landings and apparently didn't see anything wrong in them.

In all cases:

SMART-1 used a low-thrust, high-efficiency ion engine to achieve a unique "spiral" trajectory, instead of the direct transfer trajectories used by most missions, which require more powerful (high-thrust) engines. Most other lunar probes seem to have orbit-to-orbit durations similar to Apollo. The actual flight time of Chang'e 3 is about 4 days, between launch and entry into Lunar orbit. Marquardt is confused by the fact that the lander/rover separated from the parent craft and landed a week after the parent craft was already in orbit.

Radiation
Radiation is an old favorite among Apollo conspiracists, and Marquardt is no exception. He's also no exception in messing it up.

*groan* http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/apollo11-TLI.htm