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| Home page on Clavius.org |
Clavis, known as Moon Base Clavius from the moon base on them movie 2001, is a debunking web site for the critics and theorists of the Apollo moon landings. As it states on the home page, “Moon Base Clavius is an organization of amateurs and professionals devoted to the Apollo program and its manned exploration of the moon. Our special mission is to debunk the so-called conspiracy theories that state such a landing may never have occurred.”
While it is loaded with useful information regarding the landings, technologies used and so forth, I felt something was slightly off with Clavious when I first starting checking it out. Digging deeper I found this web site to be a total mystery as who created it and maintains it. The site does list a webmaster, Jay Windley, who claims to have training in engineering but never worked for NASA. His bio does not state he authored any of the articles on Clavious nor is he listed as the owner of the web site. The articles, while well written, do not feature any author names or copyrights. There are no external links to sources used. There is no advertising, so no visible means of financial support. Also, a Whois search has the ULR ownership unlisted. Very odd, particularly if you want interested readers to take your seriously.
These are all the hallmarks of a intelligence agency operation. There are no authors, no sources, no copyrights and no monetization. Why all the mystery? Why no transparency as to who they are?
Clavius reminds me of Snopes. Snopes, supposedly a site for debunking urban myths, gives enough data to prove their point and ignores the difficult details that do not. For example on Clavius, the Radiation Primer page has very useful information regarding radiation energies and effects. It lists materials that are radiation blocking and some that are not. However, it ignores the fact that those shielding materials are not present in the construction of the Apollo Command Module and the Lunar Landing Module. Both are largely constructed of aluminum, a very poor radiation blocker. But the reader is never informed of this.
Another radiation issue, the Van Allen radiation belts, the dangers are dealt with in typical fashion. As stated, “And the Apollo navigators plotted a course through the thinnest parts of the belts and arranged for the spacecraft to pass through them quickly, limiting the exposure.”
Apparently the anonymous author didn’t read Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman’s book, “Countdown” where on pages 203-204, he states they went through the thickest parts of the belts and only got the equivalent exposure of a chest x-ray. No fancy flying here! They just went head-on through the belts with little trouble. Borman goes on to add, “So much for the dire predictions some scientists had made about harmful, perhaps fatal, exposure to the belt.” Borman is dismissing the radiation hazard as being an over rated threat.
So who is lying here, Frank Borman or the anonymous writers at Clavius?
Likewise, there is no mention of plotting trajectories to avoid the harmful parts of the Van Allen belts in any NASA tech docs that I have read, nor is it ever mentioned in the transcripts of astronaut conversations. They did a 5 minute burn for a “free return trajectory” to escape earth’s gravitational field and other than some minor course corrections, they sped on to enter the moon’s gravitational field. No warping thru radiation densities as Frank Borman states in his book or in his follow-up book Apollo 8, co-written with
The treatment of critics of the Apollo moon program are abysmal. They are always referred to as “conspiracy theorists,” a term invented as a talking point by the CIA to discredit the critics of the Kennedy assassination investigation in press reports. Now it is used to attack critics of official Government accounts of everything from JFK to the 911 attacks. The anonymous writers at Clavius use this term repeatedly, implying there are no anomalies in the Apollo program, just a bunch of know-nothing conspiracy kooks. That of course is not true. Aulis.com has articles written by scientists and engineers who question effectively, many elements of the Apollo moon program.
So reader beware.
