Recently appointed science and technology advisor to Donald Trump, Yale University professor David Gelernter, in an exclusive interview with Science Today this week, claimed the Apollo moon landings never happened.
A voyage that never was
This is not the first time the controversial professor has attacked the Apollo moon landings. In his 2012 book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) the author voices his concerns about the impossibility of space travel outside the Earth’s magnetic field.
“In the modern age, we have never been outside the Earth’s magnetic field. With the exception of the alleged 24 human beings who flew lunar flights in the Apollo program during the four-year period spanning 1968 through 1972, all human spaceflights have taken place in low Earth orbit (LEO) or below. Even the International Space Station conducts all its operations in LEO,” he explained in his book.
“Why is that? This is because orbits higher than low orbit can lead to early failure of electronic components due to intense radiation and charge accumulation,” he wrote.
A dangerous belt of radiation
The Yale professor also documented in his book how NASA was, and still is, aware of the impossibility of traveling beyond the Van Allen Belt, a highly charged radioactive belt that is part of the planet’s magnetic field.
“The Apollo missions were supposed to be the first event where humans traveled through the Van Allen belts, which was one of several radiation hazards known by mission planners, but even today, NASA scientists admit they can’t get past the Van Allen Belts” he claims in his 2012 book.
“If NASA scientists honestly admit in 2012 that they still haven’t worked out how to properly shield the spacecraft from the radiation emitted from the Van Allen belts, how the hell did we send human beings into space covered in aluminum foil suits? At a particular time when the Solar activity was at its peak? The answer is simple: It just never happened,” he concluded on the matter.
Despite his controversial claims, David Gelernter is a world-renown and multiple award-winning computer scientist known for his contributions to parallel computation and his early prediction of the rise of the World Wide Web.
Time Magazine profiled Gelernter as one of the 100 most influential people of the 21st century in 2016, describing him as an “arch-genius.” The New York Times called him a computer science “rock star” and “one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time.”
