Appendix AMoon mission questions

Two points about the Apollo Moon missions of the late Sixties and early Seventies:

† There is little doubt that NASA publicity people issued fake photographs allegedly taken on the Moon's surface. Some of the iconic photos plainly have two light sources, though NASA says that the only outdoor light available came from the sun.

† NASA still hasn't fully resolved the problem of outer space radiation that would kill or gravely injure astronauts.

On this second point, NASA has said that Apollo astronauts passed through the Van Allen radiation belts that orbit the Earth quickly enough to avoid ill effects. The agency also has said the flimsy shielding provided by the spacecraft exterior and the spacesuits was sufficient to block radiation in deep space that emanates from the Sun and the cosmos in general.

But, the radiation was the same on the Moon's surface where astronauts had only spacesuits for protection. Yet, such shielding would have been inadequate had the men been hit by some random blast of radiation, such as a gamma ray burst, or an errant solar flare. Admittedly, probabilities don't favor a ship being in the path of random death rays, but they aren't negligible. Suppose a crew was wiped out by a random radiation blast while in deep space. How would the public have reacted? So what politician would be willing to take such a chance? And, who was president? Richard Nixon. Enough said.

I searched NASA's public website to find out what the agency is planning insofar as radiation shielding for the Artemis Moon shot planned for 2024.

Nothing showed up, though I did learn that for a planned mission to Mars, "Scientists and engineers are working to mature the advanced technologies that will be needed to solve the complex challenges like radiation protection and entry through the Martian atmosphere."

Astronauts need as much radiation protection between Earth and Moon as they do between Earth and Mars. In addition, solar flare radiation would be not nearly as intense near Mars as near Earth.

So if NASA does not consider Moon journey radiation a significant issue, the agency is

† Counting out the possibility of random radiation blasts and solar flares intercepting the craft.

† Counting the number of rads an astronaut can absorb "safely" on a Moon journey as opposed to the much larger number that a body can safely absorb on a Mars journey.

International Space Station workers are shielded from deep space radiation by the Earth's magnetic fields, which also shields the rest of the human race. The space station orbits underneath the deadly Van Allen belts.

Use Control f and type in radiation:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/Rocketology/tag/journey-to-mars/page/3/

Papers on Science Direct tell us that radiation blast forecasts are "not very good." https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/solar-flare

In 2018, K.D. Leka, Graham Barnes wrote:

Solar flares are one of the primary initiators of many space weather phenomena. Their fast initiation and orders-of-magnitude increase in high-energy electromagnetic radiation require true forecasting efforts. Today's probabilistic flare forecasting capability is arguably not very good.

In 2020, Yatong Chen and coauthors wrote:

Solar flares originate from the release of the energy stored in the magnetic field of solar active regions. The triggering mechanism for these flares, however, remains unknown. For this reason, the conventional solar flare forecast is essentially based on the statistic relationship between solar flares and measures extracted from observational data. In the current work, the deep learning method is applied to set up the solar flare forecasting model, in which forecasting patterns can be learned from line-of-sight magnetograms of solar active regions.