Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Mike Bara gets lost following a link

        In e-mail last week, I was taking issue with Richard Hoagland & Mike Bara, this time over the Apollo 10 Lunar Module, "Snoopy." In May 1969, just two months before the Apollo 11 triumph, Snoopy paved the way with a brilliant dress rehearsal, separating from the Command Module and flying within 16 km of the lunar surface before backing off.

        On p. 280 of Dark Mission, discussing the Apollo 10 mission, Hoagland & Bara wrote:

"While the spacecraft was theoretically fully capable of landing on the moon, inexplicably, it was not given the capability to do so."

        There is, in fact, nothing inexplicable about this. Snoopy was too heavy -- or, to be strictly accurate, would have been too heavy if it had been fully fueled.

        The purpose of  my argumentative e-mail was to point that out, and I included a link to the online  version of the Apollo 10 Press Kit. On p. 44 the dry weight of Snoopy is listed as 9,484 lb—almost 200lb heavier than Eagle, the eventual lander.


http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a410/A10_PressKit.pdf

        By some feat of misadventure, Mike only followed a partial link, and got a surprise.
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a410/A10_



        Mike sent me the screen capture above, with the sarcastic message "Gee, when I click on your link, I get the attached warning from NASA to the effect that this information can only be accessed from inside a NASA facility. That must be where you found this link.  So how long have you worked at NASA?"

        How do I know he followed an incomplete link? Easy—I can see it in his browser tab, and when I follow the same link I get exactly the same warning message that he does. Thus proving that I'm not on a NASA network.

NASA Pride
        I might add that if I did work for NASA it would be a matter of pride, and not something I would be diffident about revealing. Not at all. The notion that everyone in NASA, and everyone funded by NASA, is corrupt and deceptive is one of the most toxic aspects of the Hoagland/Bara thesis. They should be ashamed.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brilliant! Full disclosure: I worked for ESA. Like all large organizations and without doubt also within NASA you'll find some political hard-ball, full-blown paranoia and conspiracy thinking here and there within all the ranks. My suspicion is that RCH has had his sources all right from within these organization(s). Newsflash: there are also idiots working there who only understand the bit they're working on or are managing but still have some grand overblown ideas about the rest of the world. I wouldn't trust any collection of space agency sources if I were RCH, even less than political sources.

Of course the very idea that they still would have this attention from NASA would be very welcome for Bara. Anything to make themselves bigger! Even critique given by this blog would be spun that way: we must be on to something because of all the resistance and ridicule (like some Christians validate their beliefs because of Satan's attacks). Catch 22 really.

D.

expat said...

"we must be on to something because of all the resistance and ridicule"

Yes, that's a very common line coming from the true believers. "You get the most flak when you're over the target" is another cliché.

I always ask them if the converse holds true. Does anyone ever say "I must be wrong because I'm not getting criticized"?

Chris said...

If you did work for NASA why would you send him a link to internal content that he cannot access? Doesn't make sense when you think about it so I can only conclude that, as usual, he didn't think it through.

Mike shows once again that he only sees what he wants to see. This one is like the non-existent intersection in that his own 'evidence' shows him to be completely wrong.

He's so incompetent he can't even get conspiracy theory right. It's easy enough debunking the rubbish he makes up but lately he's been doing a great job of debunking himself.

Keep at it Mike.

Chris said...

It doesn't logically follow that the converse "I must be wrong because I'm not getting criticized" must be true.

However it DOES follow that if their response to your criticism is "You get the most flak when you're over the target" then it applies equally to their criticism of you and this blog.

So following their own logic, your exposing of their non-science, astrological woo and appalling marketing tactics is right on the money because you're getting flak from them for it. Although for the less intelligent Bara this "flak" amounts to him saying you're a homosexual.

expat said...

"If you did work for NASA why would you send him a link to internal content that he cannot access?"

Well I suppose his fantasy is that I might have forgotten, or perhaps not even realized, that I was posting a privileged link. But since the tail of the link, A10PressKit.pdf was plainly visible it's all a bit silly. Thanks for your comments.

Chew said...

Oh, that is rich. Doesn't Bara claim to be an engineer of some type? And he can't even copy and paste a URL. What a buffoon.

"You get the most flak when you're over the target"

No, you get the most flak when you get separated from the people who know what they're doing, you get completely lost and fly over the wrong target, a target that can concentrate all their firepower on your lone dumb ass.