What is Up with the Van Allen Belts and How Did Astronauts Survive Flying Through Them?

The shadows go in different directions! The flag is waving in a vacuum! The lander didn’t dig a crater! You can’t see any stars! It was all filmed on a soundstage by Stanley Kubrick! If any of these statements sound familiar, then odds are you’ve spent way too much time online and need to touch some grass. Ever since Bill Kaysing published his “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976, a small but growing number of dissenters have vehemently argued that neither Neil Armstrong, nor anyone else ever stepped foot on the moon. Rather, they argue, the whole Apollo programme was nothing more than an elaborate Cold War hoax, meant to demonstrate America’s technological superiority over the Soviet Union. But as we’ve already covered in exhaustive detail in our previous video How Do We Actually Know We Landed on the Moon? every single one of the popular arguments put forward by Kaysing and individuals in the aftermath has been thoroughly debunked. For example, looking at the examples we’ve just listed extremely briefly: the shadows are deflected by terrain; the flag had a metal rod along its top edge to keep it deployed; due to the moon’s low gravity the Lunar Module descent engine did not need to be powerful enough to dig a crater; and the exposure on the astronauts' cameras was set to photograph the bright lunar surface, meaning the faint stars didn’t register on the film, something you can try out for yourself with your own camera here on Earth if you like. And while yes, Stanley Kubrick did direct the moon landings, as everyone knows he was such a perfectionist that he insisted on filming on location(!). Yet among all the arguments against the feasibility of manned lunar landings, one stands out among the rest - even among regular, non-terminally-online people- the van Allen Radiation Belts. These regions, located between 640 and 58,000 kilometres or 400 and 36,000 miles above the earth’s surface, are filled with high-energy electrons, protons, and other subatomic particles emitted by the sun and trapped by the earth’s magnetic field. According to conspiracy theorists, the radiation in these belts is too intense for humans to survive, making space travel outside of Low Earth Orbit impossible. But is this true? Have the Moon Landing Conspiracy people finally scored a fatal blow against NASA and the 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo Missions? Does this one, single data point, negate the literally hundreds of thousands of other confirmations we have during the Apollo Missions and countless more since? Well, no. But this wouldn’t be a very convincing or interesting video if we stopped there. And, in truth, it’s a great question. And has a super interesting answer with a lot of interesting things to learn along the way. So how did the Apollo astronauts survive crossing such a dangerous region of outer space? Well, slip into your space suit- pull on your lead-lined underwear -... maybe not in that order unless you want to look like Superman… as we blast off in search of answer to how the brilliant engineers and scientists working on all this solved this problem. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices