This link from post #2 doesn't work any more.
buzzcreek (dot) com/grade-a/MOON/articles1 (dot) htm
It's important info so I'm going to post the whole article.
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Did NASA steal $30 Billion to Fake
The Apollo Moon Landings?
Home Paper Moon Page
ARTICLE IN MEDIA BYPASS MAGAZINE, SEPT. 1997
THE VAN ALLEN ENIGMA
By Phylis and James Collier
In the early 1950's, a 35-year-old State University of Iowa physics professor and some of his students were cruising the cold waters ofnorthern Canada and the Atlantic Ocean, sending a series ofrocket-carrying balloons- which they dubbed "rockoons" - 12 to 15 miles into space.
They were trying to measure the nature of low-energy cosmic raysswirling around the earth. The experiments continued for five more years. Then, in 1958,Professor James Van Allen discovered his monster. Suddenly, his instrumentation warned of a giant beast of a thing, spewing enough deadly radiation counts to kill any human who ventured into its domain unprotected.
Van Allen and his students weren't sure of the size, shape and texture of the monster, they just knew they had encountered an incredible phenomenon.
Then, in l958, as part of the International Geophysical Year (a year in which men like James A. Van Allen were praised for exploring the realms of time and space) the young professor asked the U.S. military to send his experiments deeper into space, this time using a Geiger Counter to measure the intensity of the radiation. He further requested the most sophisticated rockets that would penetrate l00,000 miles into space.
That's when the monster grew all encompassing. It appeared to surround the entire earth and extend out some 65,000 miles, maybe even 100,000 miles. The Geiger Counter confirmed that the region above the earth, and in the path of the rocket, was cooking with deadly radiation. That radiation was born from solar flares that would race through the universe and become trapped by the earth's magnetic field. A deadly mixture of protons and electrons.
It was then that Van Allen realized the Aurora Borealis, the northern lights, was actually a visual manifestation of that tremendous energy from the sun. You could actually see the radiation swirling in a magnificent and deadly dance. His eventual finding of two such lethal radiation belts, put his name in the history books as the man who discovered the Van Allen Radiation Belts. There was an inner belt and an outer belt. The inner belt went from 40 degrees north and south of the Equator and was basically a doughnut surrounding the earth. Scientific experiments conducted by Van Allen and the military proved that belt was so deadly that no human could survive in its orbit. The outer belt was equally as destructive, and separated from the inner belt by an area of lesser radiation.
Van Allen's conclusion was delivered in a speech to the Academy of Science in 1959. He warned future space travelers they would have to race through these two zones on their way to outer planets.
"All manned space flight attempts must steer clear of these two belts of radiation until adequate means of safeguarding the astronauts has been developed" he said. Moreover, Van Allen advised they would have to be shielded with some extra layers of protection beyond that of the spacecraft itself. These findings were also published in Scientific American Magazine, March, 1959.
Two years later, Van Allen updated his report in Space World Magazine, December, 1961. In brief, he reported that everything he had found in 1959 was still valid. It was also in that year that President John F. Kennedy told an assembled group of students and dignitaries at Rice University in Houston, that it was America's destiny to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. With that statement, the space race become a political game, worth 30 billion in taxpayer dollars to the winners. National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA), which is part of the Department of Defense and the CIA, became the caretaker of Kennedy's dream.
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