Lissauer made it clear that as a result, he too is of the opinion that the rogue planet must have been substantially larger than that originally proposed but noted that it is difficult to see how the excess angular momentum resulting from such a large impact could have been lost.
Three other scientists, Ruzicka, Snyder and Taylor, approached the problem from a slightly different direction by analysing the biochemical data available against the theoretical Big Whack. After a detailed examination they concluded: ‘There is no strong geochemical support for either the Giant Impact or Impact-triggered Fission hypotheses.’12
These words used in the conclusion to this biochemical analysis indicate just how hopelessly contrived the whole Big Whack theory is. They go on to say: ‘This [hypothesis] has arisen not so much because of the merits of [its] theory as because of the apparent dynamical or geochemical short-comings of other theories.’
In other words scientists hang onto the Big Whack theory, even though it has more holes than a rusty colander, simply because no other logical explanation has been found. It is just the least impossible explanation for a celestial body that has no right to be there.
Not only is the Big Whack theory discredited on a number of grounds by the scientific fraternity itself, it also singularly fails to deal with the anomalies thrown up by our own research, as outlined throughout this book. Big Whack cannot explain the extraordinary ratio relationship between the Moon and the Sun or the Moon and the Earth. The Moon could, by pure chance, end up being exactly 1/400th the size of the Sun and occupying an orbit that allows it to stand 1/400th the distance between the Earth and the Sun – but the odds are, quite literally, astronomically against it.
The Moon is proportionally bigger in relation to its host planet than any other in the solar system apart from Charon, Pluto’s moon, which is more than half the diameter of Pluto. These two bodies are essentially twin planets or may be asteroids orbiting each other at close range although they are believed to have an unrelated origin.
Mercury has no moons at all and neither has Venus. Mars does have two moons but they are tiny in comparison with our own.
A close examination of the many samples of Moon rock brought back by the American Apollo missions and the Soviet unmanned missions has thrown up what turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of all. It has been observed that the oldest of the rocks collected from the Moon are significantly more ancient that any rock ever found on Earth. The most venerable rocks to be found on the Earth date back 3.5 billion years, whilst some samples from the Moon are around 4.5 billion years old – which is very close to the estimated age of our solar system. When radioactive dating techniques are applied to meteorites they are uniformly found to be 4.6 billion years old.
Yet even these rocks have the same oxygen isotope signature as those on Earth, another indication that the Moon has occupied its present distance from the Sun for an incredibly long time. There is currently no persuasive argument for this state of affairs.
Our own, almost accidental, discoveries regarding the peculiar ratio relationships between the Earth, Moon and Sun described in our previous book, Civilization One,13 led us to an in-depth appraisal of the latest theories regarding the Moon and its origins. We were stunned by what we discovered. The Moon is bigger than it should be, apparently older than it should be and much lighter in mass than it should be. It occupies an unlikely orbit and is so extraordinary that all existing explanations for its presence are fraught with difficulties and none of them could be considered remotely watertight. We came to realize that many reputable experts across the world have significant misgivings about current theories concerning the Moon’s origins that, as we have shown in this chapter, they were quite willing to voice publicly.
No matter how much the advocates of the Big Whack theory may claim they have solved the puzzle that is the Moon, it is quite obvious that this claim is far from being true. The Moon remains, to borrow the words of Winston Churchill, ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.
Chapter Four
Walking On The Moon
‘We choose to go to the moon.’
President John F Kennedy: September 12th, 1962
After the end of the Second World War, rocket scientists from Germany were ‘liberated’ by both the United States and the Soviet Union, and by the beginning of the 1950s these experts were put to work on creating weapons of various sorts that would fuel the Cold War between the Eastern communists and the Western capitalists. On the American side the most famous of the German experts was Vernher Von Braun who had created the V1 and V2 rockets for Nazi Germany and who eventually went on to design the Saturn V rocket that would take people to the Moon.
At the outset the USA focused its attentions on developing new types of small but immensely powerful hydrogen bombs based on nuclear fusion whilst the USSR continued to refine the older and much heavier fission bomb. The Soviets therefore had to develop more powerful rockets and the R-7 missile, capable of carrying a five-tonne warhead, was the result. Their Chief Designer, Sergei Korolyov, realized that these rockets would also be capable of putting a one-and-a-half tonne satellite into Earth’s orbit and he put forward his plan for such a mission.
Korolyov’s project was well under way when news came that the US was developing its own satellite launch, known as Project Vanguard. This new challenge set up a ‘race to space’ and Korolyov’s main satellite project was temporarily suspended as all efforts became focused on the early launch of a smaller artificial satellite that could be built far more quickly. Sputnik lifted into the skies on October 4th 1957.
This first spacecraft was a forty-pound sphere that carried a simple transmitter so that it could make meaningless, but technical sounding, bleeping sounds at which the world could marvel. The acclaim and sheer excitement caused by Sputnik’s success led the Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, to demand more high-profile stunts rather than a return to serious science. The team responded immediately by screwing together the original Sputnik’s backup spares to create a second Sputnik. They had only a few weeks as they were instructed that the next launch must happen before November 7th – the fortieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution.
Sputnik 2 was something of a botched job but it captured the imagination of the planet because it took off four days ahead of the anniversary and, amazingly, it was carrying a passenger: a dog called Laika. Unfortunately for this canine hero, her ticket was strictly one way because this hastily assembled craft had no mechanism for a controlled return to Earth – so the animal was destined to die in orbit from the outset. It is thought that she lived for four days in space before suffering a painful death as the cabin overheated. The fatality was part of the plan and the mission was considered a success as it proved that a living creature could survive the journey into orbit. So despite the fact that Sputnik 2 was initiated as a publicity stunt it was an important prelude to a human being making the trip.
The first two Sputniks were therefore politically inspired projects carried out by Sergei Korolyov under orders from the Kremlin and it was not until May 15th 1958 that his original spacecraft was launched – now designated Sputnik 3. This was a serious piece of equipment that was an automated scientific laboratory. It carried twelve instruments providing data on pressure and composition of the upper atmosphere; concentration of charged particles; photons in cosmic rays; heavy nuclei in cosmic rays; magnetic and electrostatic fields; and meteoric particles. And it was Sputnik 3 that first detected the presence of the outer radiation belts that surround the Earth.
The United States was highly embarrassed by the Soviet achievements, and particularly so because it was having little success with its own rocket launchers. So many of them blew up on the launch pad or during takeoff that the world’s press variously dubbed the American space mission ‘Kaputnik, Flopnik, and Stayputnik’.
In the summer of 1958 the Western world was rocking and rolling to Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel�
� and ‘Jailhouse Rock’ whilst the politicians of the ex-Russian territory of Alaska were lobbying to be accepted as the 49th State of the Union. In Washington, however, the US government’s main focus was on something much more important – a new idea that was going to be a grand solution to a double-edged problem.
Their first concern was Sputnik. These high-profile launches had very effectively announced to the world that Soviet scientists were smarter than American ones and it was also implicit that the ‘bad guys’ had the technology to deliver heavy nuclear weapons around the planet. America had fallen well behind in the race for definitive military advantage and the idea of a ‘first strike’ by the Soviets suddenly seemed possible and, for some, even probable given the USA’s current inability to respond in kind.
The second problem was one of internal power blocks. The US Army and Navy were politically untouchable and each had separate rocketry programmes causing duplication of effort that was dramatically slowing down the rate of overall progress. In the light of all this, Congress decided to side step military fiefdoms and set up a new organization to oversee and coordinate American space research.
Accordingly the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed on October 1st 1958 and the idea of putting a man into space was immediately outlined, and given the title ‘Project Mercury’. But it was a race they were destined to lose because on April 12th 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
Gagarin’s 108-minute voyage took him once around the planet, although he was not allowed to operate the controls because the effects of weightlessness had only been tested on dogs, and scientists were concerned that he may not be able to function properly. Consequently, ground crews controlled the mission with an override key provided just in case of an emergency.
NASA responded quickly by sending the astronaut Alan Shepherd on a ballistic trajectory sub-orbital flight to an altitude of 116 miles, returning to Earth at a landing point just 302 miles down the Atlantic Missile Range. America’s first manned space flight was a fifteen minute sky rocket event that was nowhere near the same league as Yuri Gagarin’s 25,000 mile, high-speed voyage into Earth’s orbit.
The race to get a man into space had been won by the USSR but there was a second, more ambitious competition running in parallel. Reaching for the Moon!
At first these were half-hearted attempts to get some metal, any bit of metal, onto the Moon. It had started with the first Pioneer rocket launched in 1958 by the United States – which lasted a full seventy-seven seconds before disintegrating into a giant fireball. A few months later the USSR launched Luna I, which performed beautifully but unfortunately missed the Moon and headed into solar orbit. In September 1959 the USSR managed to hit the bull’s-eye when Luna 2 became the first craft to land on another celestial body, slamming into the Moon’s surface just east of the Sea of Serenity. Before the impact Luna 2 was able to report back that there was something very odd about the Moon – it did not seem to have a magnetic field.
The next Soviet craft, Luna 3, made a great stride forward by swinging around the Moon, taking photographs of the ‘dark’ side before heading back to Earth in April 1960. The Americans meanwhile had failure after failure.
Nikita Khrushchev was pleased with the way that his nation was winning the space race and when Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth his propaganda machine went into overdrive to ensure that the world knew how superior his space engineers were. America’s newly elected President was no slouch when it came to inspiring the public and John F Kennedy decided to take control of the situation by announcing that the real battle was to put men on the Moon. Despite a history of underperformance in space technology, he rather bravely publicly pledged to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s.
Many American Ranger and Soviet Luna spacecraft headed for the Moon during the decade but a large number missed and others crashed onto the lunar surface either by accident or sometimes by design. But it was the USSR, once again, that made the next breakthrough when Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to make a controlled landing onto the surface of another celestial body on February 3rd 1966.
A significant part of the problem was the weird nature of the Moon’s mass that was not at all what was expected. Instead of a generally constant gravitational field such as the Earth exhibits across its surface, the Moon is an inconsistent, lumpy ball that has huge variations in gravity from region to region.
As we have discussed, a pendulum swings with fairly regular precision on the Earth, with only quite small variations in swing rate because of the bulging of the planet at the equator. This is due to the fact that a person standing at sea level at the equator is a little further away from Earth’s dense core than someone closer to one of the poles. Using a pendulum on the Moon would not produce any meaningful result because of what are known as ‘mascons’.
The term mascon is an abbreviation for ‘mass concentration’ – regions of the Moon that have hugely dense material below the surface, rather than in the core as everyone would naturally expect. These mascons made it very difficult for spacecraft to orbit close to the Moon without continual adjustments to compensate for the variations in gravity. Some observers believe that it was this gravitational minefield that caused all of the problems for the early probes that were directed on the basis of a homogeneous gravity.
The existence of mascons was discovered after Lunar Orbiter 1 went into orbit around the Moon on August 14th 1966 and sent back high-quality images of over two million square miles of lunar surface, including the first detailed images of potential landing sites for the planned Apollo missions.
This new discovery of gravitational ‘hotspots’ on the Moon had an impact on a man who is arguably the greatest science fiction writer of all time and an acknowledged inspiration to NASA. Arthur C Clarke combined forces with film director Stanley Kubrick to write and shoot the most realistic space adventure ever. When their film 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in April 1968, it stunned audiences across the world with its beautifully produced vision of the future.
The plot of the film starts millions of years ago when our ancestors were still apelike creatures without speech or tools. There is a visitation from some undisclosed power in the form of a jet-black and perfectly finished rectangular monolith that stands upright. When touched by the probing fingers of the gang of primates at dawn the monolith somehow remaps their brains to begin a process that will take these proto-humans on the evolutionary road to intellectual development. As the camera pans up the length of the monolith the Sun and the Moon appear directly overhead as though an eclipse is about to occur. The scene then leaps forward to the beginning of the twenty-first century when a powerful magnetic anomaly is discovered just below the surface of the Moon in the Tycho crater and excavations are carried out to discover what is causing the effect. A black monolith, some four metres tall is uncovered and a team of experts sets out from Earth to investigate the clearly artificial phenomenon.
The team travel to the Tycho crater as the Sun rises and wearing spacesuits they walk down a ramp into the pit where the monolith stands just a few metres below the surface. Like the man-apes millions of years earlier the team leader, Dr Floyd, is mesmerized by this alien structure and he touches it with his gloved hand. A moment later a ray of sunlight comes over the edge of the pit and strikes the monolith, signalling the end of the dark lunar night that lasts for two Earth weeks. This time, as we look up the monolith we see the Sun and Earth hovering directly above and almost touching. Then suddenly, the object transmits a signal in the direction of one of the moons of Jupiter (in Clarke’s novel version this was changed to Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons).
The ingenious idea that Clarke put forward here was astonishingly close to the real-world discovery of the lunar mascons that had been made around the time he was writing. The similarity between Clarke’s magnetic anomaly and the gravitational anomalies are obvious. We wonder whether Clarke was aware of the newly dis
covered mascons and whether that gave him the idea of a kind of trip switch placed on the Moon in the extreme past by some alien intelligence to trigger a signal that told them that creatures from the Earth had become smart enough to reach the Moon and spot a serious abnormality.
What a brilliant concept!
If an alien intelligence had indeed been responsible for the evolution of humans from ape to technologist, then what better way would there be of setting up an alarm system to confirm our intellectual ‘arrival’.
At the time that Clarke and Kubrick’s film was first capturing the imagination of a generation, no human had yet reached the Moon. But the following year, with less than six months to go to the late President Kennedy’s deadline, Commander Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the Moon on July 20th 1969 with his famous but slightly misdelivered line:
‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’
At this point we must mention that there are some people who seriously believe that NASA faked the Moon landings on a film set just like the one used by Stanley Kubrick. The evidence they produce looks reasonable at a casual glance; assuming you know nothing at all about photography or the facts relating to lunar conditions. These ideas suddenly leaped into the public imagination on February 15th 2001 when Fox television in the USA broadcast a programme called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? The thrust of the show was that NASA technology in the 1960s was simply too primitive to have taken men to the Moon, and because they were so close to President Kennedy’s politically important deadline they fabricated the entire mission in a movie studio.
To them the fraud was obvious. They point out that shots of the astronauts on the lunar surface show a completely black sky without any stars. Had this proved too difficult for the set constructors to fake they ask? The answer is actually very simple. As any proficient photographer knows, it is difficult to capture something extremely bright and something else extremely dim in the same shot. This means that for the stars to be visible, the lunar surface and the astronauts would have been burned out into a white blaze; the emulsion on a piece of film does not have enough dynamic range to capture both ends of the brightness scale simultaneously.
Who Built the Moon? Page 6
