"Curiosity Mars "landing" BIGGEST HOAX EVER!!!"

You have to think of "shooting stars" or meteors. That is essentially what this is. It is released in orbit, it's going down just like a meteor, 13,000+ miles per hour. It's like a shooting star, or other satellites you see in the sky at night. It is not dropping like a rock.

Imagine seeing a shooting star, how they speed across the sky at night, and think what it would take to slow it down if it was the size/weight of a Sports Utility Vehicle.

A man sized parachute in an atmoshpere 60-100x less dense than Earths? A little fuel like the gas tank on an automobile? Hardly.

That is why I say this is all nonsense. If it was real, you would be getting all the data before they fix it all for the questions they get.

You would hear "it is 10 seconds since the vehicle module was released from orbit, the onboard computers are now reporting a speed of XXX based on XXX measuring devices, laser sensors are reporting a height of XXX, atmospheric pressure from the XXX device is detecting XXX, temperature sensors are reporting XXX ... it is now 1 minute ...." and so on. But they are afraid people will catch them with the fraud, so they will never do that. But I am sure any sensors used in such a project, if real, would be reporting a steady, easily readable stream of this data for human correction/intervention. That would be essential. Don't give me this "oh, it's in a special code, and we will be deciphering it over the next few months" bullshit!

It's a parody site, fools, it's not real. It's a joke.

Hahaha. You fucking goofball. Why is it a hoax, you fucking mongloid knuckledragger? What proof do you have that it's not real? None, you fucking fool.

Amazing that your entire 'fact' is based off some christian forum, people who shun science in any way they can to begin with.
But, that is probably more accurate then what people who actually studied tell you right...

This is NASA's new film:

[link to mars.jpl.nasa.gov]

Meet the film crew with Curiosity:

[link to media.timesfreepress.com]

Getting things ready for a day on the set:

[link to www.washingtonpost.com]

On location:

[link to www.kcet.org]

Meanwhile, back on the ranch ...

[link to i.dailymail.co.uk]

We got nothing better to do than watch every pixel come in over the 300 baud link ... Hey, I only make 200K/year, chill. I could make better money with my brains doing this in the private sector. You should be thankful I am willing to sacrifice for pennies.

"Landover Baptist" is a PARODY site. It's a JOKE, don't you get that?

Study the mission profile. The parachute is NOT deployed when the spacecraft is in orbit!

What we were shown in the NASA control room was they were just told that they were the only ones not laid off by NASA (yet)

I haven't owned a TV since the DHTV conversion. Nor did I watch much before then. Why do you assume the only reason someone might understand a little about space sciences is because they are a drooling couch potato blindly accepting everything NBC shows them?



I can sympathize -- the only sports I ever followed with any regularity was the Sumo season. But, really, if you are going to go around saying "This is an obvious fake," and ESPECIALLY if you are going to make a point about having professional technical expertise to back it up, it would behoove you to know SOMETHING about the damn program you are insulting.



Ridiculous.

You don't want to study "propaganda," so instead of looking at any technical description, you go directly to some simplified general-public description.

And you want to pontificate about how you understand all the mistakes they made, but you don't consider it important to learn what it is they actually claimed to do?

Is this how you would do a consultancy? "I don't know anything about what you are doing inside the process building, but I know you are doing it all wrong."




No, it didn't. Talk about the real project, not your imaginary version of it.




Hey, I can calculate too! I'm gonna calculate how many Indian elephants can fit in an ocean cargo container. The elephant is probably about 6x heavier than a person -- I'm not going to bother looking it up -- and a cargo container is about the size of two cars, I think. So now all I have to do is show off how well I can multiply and subtract, right?

Ridiculous.

You don't even have the entry speed right. Not even in the ballpark. Nor do you know what the terminal velocity is -- you seem to have forgotten about those rockets that bugged you so much earlier.



Fuck you on apologist. Nothing I've said is flag-waving for NASA (or for JAXA or ESA, for that matter.) I'm just pointing out your (basic) mistakes.

Cripes. Do you have something against reading? Do you consider it a holy writ to know nothing about the project you are disparaging?

The landing was autonomous. This has been highlighted by NASA over and over again.

Heck, think of this; while NASA has been making the effort to explain to the general public about the difficulties of operating a spacecraft 7-odd light minutes away, and has been carefully explaining to that same general public good basic science about the speed of light and the scale of the solar system, what have YOU been doing? Anything to help anyone? Or just tooting your own "look at me, the guy who is smart enough to know better" horn?

And, oh...many spacecraft have been partially autonomous. It isn't entirely new.



Current technology? There is no new science here...what was done was theoretically possible in the Apollo era (just unlikely to be successfully engineered then.)

Isn't their already 2 Nasa rovers on Mars? why is it so hard for people to believe that Nasa just put another one there that is a little bigger. Technology advances, get use to it.

It isn't important WHAT they believe -- just that it contradicts what they see as the mainstream view.

Which is why some posters are arguing Curiosity is real but ridiculously shoddy (the "Why didn't they just send my new iPad up there because it would take better pictures" crowd).

Some are arguing it is faked.

Some are arguing ALL space missions are faked.

Some are arguing it is there, it works, but the Power That Be are hiding all the cool Martian ruins and furry Martian bipeds from us.

Some are arguing it is there, it works, and anyone can SEE the cool Martian ruins and the furry Martian bipeds in the photographs provided.

It doesn't matter, as long as there is a conspiracy somewhere -- and the poster is one of the rare people who saw through it.

Funny how people who belive we went on the moon and sent a rover on Mars never present counter arguments to those who don't believe it...

All their arguments are : you're stupid, you're insane, absurd, prepostrous, etc.

I, for one, don't believe that Neil Armstrong or any other member of the Apollo missions went on the moon... if you inform yourself objectively, you cannot ignore the many proofs and inconsitencies against NASA stories.

I strongly suspect that Curiosity is another hoax of the same type, but I still don't have enough knowledge and information to be sure. Although, NASA is currently testing a moon landing vehicle at Cape Kennedy and after it crashed and burned, they said it was normal and it would take many testing before they get it right... If today, in 2012, they are not yet capable to control that vehicle (in the well known environment of earth) I have a hard time believing that they did so more than 40 years ago on the moon and that they perfectly landed Curiosity on MARS...

History demonstrates that governments have always lied to the population in order to accomplished certain goals this has always been true and probably always will be...

No, you are not pointing out my mistakes. You are failing to see that the propaganda the media puts out is full of mistakes and contradictions. If you read my posts, you would see that, because I pointed it out with references.

I am explaining things easily and clearly with round numbers. I don't need to waste my time with nonsense, I already have ideas of what is possible and what is not possible. All that was required to pull this off was an automated program to fill the displays at NASA with "data". These rovers roll a few km in the course of their lifetime, and that could all be filmed and photographed in 1 day, and then pieced out to the public in little parts over years.

When I study an engineering problem with foundations that have not already been proven possible, I don't go down a nonsense path and do 1000 calculations. I get and idea of what is possible and not possible by doing basic calculations in my head, just as I did here. And despite wrong/contradictory info in the MSM, the basic facts are:

13,000mph -> 0 in 7 minutes with only a
parachute a little bigger than the type
a man uses on Earth (50ft in diameter
one source said - not very big)?
I already showed you how to calculate
what it would take to land 2000lbs
with a parachute in the Martian atmosphere
so that it would hit as fast as a man on Earth,
which would be a parachute with 1000-2000x
the area of a standard parachute for a man
on Earth, way more than 50ft in diameter.

I already showed that it would take fuel
several times the size of the payload to
slow the payload down from 13,000mph in
the Martian atmosphere - just as a rockets
fuel weighs more than the rest of the rocket,
same for going the opposite direction from
13,000mph -> 0. It just fails the common
sense test - I can't make it more clear.
It doesn't warrant deeper investigation.

There simply is no way for 2000++lbs to go
from 13,000mph to zero in a near vaccuum in 7
minutes using a stupid 50ft parachute. Also,
consider that the landing assembly wants to
speed up as it's orbit tightens, like a
figure skater. Where do you think all that
energy is going? How is it being dissipated?
Heat? That's one hot parachute then.

You are not addressing any facts or logic
I put forth. Nor can you show me any
technology that can do all of this
automatically. Why didn't we just let the
Space Shuttle drop down with a parachute?
Why bother with heat tiles? SO SILLY.

I don't want to make things
too complicated for people to understand.
It isn't necessary. That's a propagada
tactic: to lose people's sight of the forest
by examining every tree cell.

We are not so advanced. Nor were we advanced
enough to go to the moon in the 1960s. I saw
the Apollo module at the Smithsonian when I was
a kid - AND IT WAS A F_ING JOKE! It was like
2 Aluminum cans with coconut shells between,
totally stripped out - not a single instrument
or placard in the thing, maybe 1/2 inch thick,
maybe a few loose wires.

I looked for some sign of technology in it, some
sign of rugged durability - and it was crappier
than a napalmed 1969 VW Beetle. It was just
garbage. And if you saw it, looked inside it,
you would be saying the same things. I have
seen their work 1st hand. IT'S A JOKE!

And you certainly could have never sat or moved
around in that thing with a spacesuit + backpack.
PEOPLE ARE STUPID - AND THEY KNOW THAT.
THEY KNOW THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING!
There is NOTHING you won't believe if people
in the MSM tell you something is so.

Why is it NASA won't let people see the old Apollo modules? National Security? NO. It's because people would laugh at them. I don't buy any of the rover nonsense because we don't have sufficient braking devices to land gently on another planet. We can't dissipate that much energy.

Don't you think we would put parachutes in satellites if it was possible? To avoid space junk and possible death from falling debris? To examine the units at their end of life and learn things from them?

The programs are used for revenue and mass psychology, to make the population feel good about something as they slave away in jobs they mostly hate, if they have one at all. Bread & Circus for the unclean masses, keeping their heads up as they drown.

Diameter of the supersonic parachute according to NASA is 16 meters. Diameter of the T10 I used to jump under is 11 meters. The T10 was rated for 160 kg and would reduce fall speed to about 7 m/s.

Ignoring the deacceleration phase for the moment, the static point is a 3,354 kg package (rover, skycrane, aeroshell and fuel) moving at 100 m/s.

As a first approximation, air resistance is per velocity squared. Parachutes a wee bit more complex than that, tho -- I don't have the time or energy this morning to look up how you model one!

But...knowing this is pie-in-the-sky, not even a zeroth-level calculation... if you assume 2.1 x the area of a T10 and 1/50th of the resistance (aka we are just assuming sea level here), and simply (if not farcically) using the square of the difference in final velocity (100-7, 8,649 times), solving for weight in 1G = 58,000 kg.

Obviously things do not scale quite so simply or so linearly, but as a sanity check, the above says it is plausible.

Incidentally, the same page I got the above for the parachute states that out of that 3,354 kg package, 390 kg is propellant.





Congratulations on at least starting to look.




You are right. It DOESN'T make sense if the requirement is that the rover perform a good PLF at 7 m/s.

Good thing that wasn't the plan. That 390 kg of propellant mentioned? Assuming the total weight of the spacecraft is still 3,354 kg at this point (it isn't, because the parachute is released and the aeroshell dropped), and using an isp of 234s for the monopropellent hydrazine as used in the MLE thrusters....well, I'm sure you can calculate the available delta-v from there!

"The Media?"

If you want to point out where the media gets science wrong, I will gladly follow you there.

I was under the impression you wanted to talk about the ACTUAL spacecraft.




I love me some back-of-the-envelope too. But there's a difference between assuming a spherical cow, and assuming that cows can fly. If you are going to do a ballpark figure you at least have to be in the same ballpark.




I think you underestimate the size and difficulty of the data generation, but I agree that it would be possible. Generating imagery that is consistent with real-world optics, for instance, is computationally expensive, and I'd like at least five years to do it. But it could be done.

Similar constraints exist for the various mechanisms of the spacecraft itself; you can't fill in random numbers; you have to have decent models. But it can be done.

What would be much more difficult is seeding into your data new discoveries in exo-geology, which would then be discussed and analyzed and broken down by the top people in the field across the world, AND would remain consistent with anything discovered over all of the decades you intend to keep the hoax going -- against every observation from other probes, earth-bound telescopes, Martian meteorites, etc.




But you haven't studied. That's my basic problem with your work. You have made unsubstantiated assumptions about the mission profile. You are, in essentials, looking at a 767 and asking how it could possibly drive itself through the water with underwing engines.





Wrong. Over and over, I've told you that the parachute is not used to slow from the velocity of primary re-entry. A moment of looking at descriptions of the actual spacecraft would show you this.

And it has also been explained that the terminal part of the parachute phase is NOT zero velocity. Not even close to it.



Why are you requiring each INDIVIDUAL system to carry the entire burden? What happened to the parachute you were just talking about? How are we suddenly back to full orbital velocity?

Does it not register that there are five different processes going on at different phases of the re-entry, and each of them accounts for part of the velocity change (and each operates within a different regime of local velocity and air pressure?)



Weird way to describe gravitational acceleration.

And...wow....you get so damned close, and then you fall away again. You'd think you'd never heard of any spacecraft performing re-entry, either on Mars or here on Earth.



You are using bad facts. That makes the logic immaterial; the work can only be "not even wrong."

And again you get so close, then shy away as if afraid of making a realization. Something that is clearly stated in every description I've seen. Something I've alluded to in every single post I've made here.




We seem to have seen different spacecraft. The last time I was on the Mall, I found the A11 CM was in surprisingly shoddy shape. Dirty, too.

But there is something else I found -- which you would have found if you had a few more minutes on your visit. And that is that the construction methods and quality are substantially similar to the other craft on display there. That is...to aircraft that I am fairly sure you DO believe were fully capable of flying.

The Apollo CM in no way stood out as being simpler, cruder, or less robust than those quite flyable aircraft.



Oh, and by the way...the PLSS was not used in the CM. Idiot.

You really believe these lunatics?

Yah...but works out to more like .38 G, not .10

The "engineer" is still ignoring the first phase of re-entry -- where the majority of the velocity was absorbed by the Martian atmosphere.

How is it that high?

You can't take a adjustment for the distance from center (which would be about 2^2 = 4) because gravity is not all from the center of mass. It should be clear without doing integration that for any kind of reasonable mass distribution, the adjustment is less than x4 .

That is a satire website. A pretty hilarious one I might add.

But I am sure some people indeed believe it was a hoax.

I'm sure I saw something like a LEM at the Smithsonian. Wasn't it a real one?

Heh. Been a while since I've done this, but I think the approximation for surface gravity assumes a point source. Sure, there are local mass concentrations -- you can map them on Earth, and they are important enough to mess with your orbit around the Moon, but for a first approximation, use a point.

Mars is about half the diameter of Earth, and if remember correctly, about 1/6 the mass. So multiply 1G by 4 and divide by 6 and you end up around .6 G. Which is close enough for zero significant figures.




Still, take-home is that the Martian surface gravity is less than that of Earth. Not a magnitude less, tho -- so you still need to get within a magnitude of the right answer even when you don't include a correction for Martian gravity.

(If I recall correctly, the atmospheric gradient is also different on Mars. I believe it is deeper, and this is true for all lighter worlds; this means that the correction for altitude is smaller (aka the pressure falls more slowly in proportion to distance.))

But I could be mis-remembering.

There are no flown LM in museums. (Funny thing...they are either on the Moon, or burnt up in re-entry!)

If I am remembering correctly, Air and Space has an early boiler-plate that has been mocked up a little to look like flight configuration. Houston has a complete but unflown. There are more flown CMs around since those were generally recovered.


Heh. The poster you quote apparently forgot describing, himself, viewing one of the spacecraft he claims are hidden from view. Consistency much?

OK, you have provided some useful information, no need for name-calling. I only did it in one post because you seemed to be making a hit & run attack on my credentials and the seriousness of my assertions.

You are right in saying I don't have all the facts, and you ought to question why we don't have all the facts. Why not make all of them public immediately on Twitter or on a dynamicly updating webpage? Why would NASA hold back on all the sensor measurements that the autopilot is using to perform it's functions?

I like all of your new data, especially the parachute data. So, the landing assembly is a total of almost 7500lbs! Almost 1000lbs is fuel, ok. Wow! So, we are talking about 2-3 full size SUV's now. I can now say that it would take a parachute 4000-8000x the surface area of a T10 to land that assembly at 7m/s (23ft/s) on Mars, from a stationary free-fall (no 13,000mph initial velocity!). Just to give people some idea of things.

As far as the unit wanting to gain speed as it tightens it's orbit, it is not simply a matter of gravitational acceleration (which is important), it is ADDITIONALLY a matter of angular momentum, L = Iw. I = inertia, w = angular velocity.

L will remain constant, but using I = mr2, since mass is constant, a reduction in the radius will cause I to decrease, and since L is constant, w must increase to compensate.

I must inform you that experience over the years counts for something. I worked for the FAA almost a decade, and we WOULD put parachutes in aircraft if it was possible, to prevent high-speed crashes into the earth, but it simply isn't possible - the engineering of such a feat is old old news. It would take parachutes occupying entire payload, and still wouldn't allow a gentle enough landing to save anything or anyone! And as I said, we would put them in satellites to recover them and learn about the wear and tear and failures, and to eliminate space debris which is a big cause for concern, and we wouldn't have relied on pilots or high-speed entry of the Space Shuttle if it was possible to use auto-pilot and parachutes. The heat on re-entry was the most dangerous aspect of the shuttles engineering, and would have been avoided if at all possible. BUT IT IS NOT POSSIBLE - across the board - no matter what aspect of aerospace you look at - whether aircraft, satellites, shuttles, ANYTHING - it is NOT POSSIBLE for humans to engineer planetary/asteroid/moon landings of heavy high-speed devices using parachutes - the idea is NOT NEW - it is decades old! And there has never been any realistic design for doing so, it's just a batshit crazy OLD idea that's been calculated 1000s of times by 1000s of people. They have been used on ultra-lights, displacing all other payload, but that's their limit.

> What would be much more difficult is seeding into your data new discoveries in exo-geology, which would then be discussed and analyzed and broken down by the top people in the field across the world, AND would remain consistent with anything discovered over all of the decades you intend to keep the hoax going -- against every observation from other probes, earth-bound telescopes, Martian meteorites, etc.

That is exactly what happens. What do you think we would do with all our physics graduates without bogus welfare projects? Give them food stamps? NO. We create nonsense for them to study, like "Earth rocks from the Moon!" So they can invent theories of how a big asteroid hit earth billions of years ago, and knocked a chunk of Earth into a perfect orbit with a perfect spin so that one side always faces the Earth! Look how much idiotic work that generated for decades!

I don't need to study all these things. I am over 50 years old and have worked in these areas for over 25 years - what are new ideas to you are old ideas to me. I already know they don't work because I am aware of all the work and effort that has been done on this type of thinking for decades. And obviously you are not. So, just keep providing data, that is fine with me. I am not afraid of data. I admit I don't have all the data, but I will trust what you provide, you seem to provide good data.

You also must explain how all the energy is dissipated. I am telling you this is an age old problem that has never been solved. If you have extraordinary claims that this problem has been solved, then you are the one that must provide the extraordinary evidence, not me.

Getting things to move 10,000+ mph in space is easy with enough fuel, going from 10,000+ mph to 0 without any fuel, or using a parachute - well, that's very laughable. And based on my knowledge and experience, knowing it has been worked on for decades, and knowing the physics involved, know it is a problem without any current solution.

As you stated yourself, the Apollo CM was completely destroyed by NASA or the govt, and for what reason? You don't question reality. THERE WAS A REASON. It is laughable to think that dropped into Earth with some silly parachutes. If it were possible, WE WOULD DO IT WITH SATELLITES. We do not like losing them all to total destruction and space debris!

If you have more essential data, I will be glad to review it, but I must work on other things for the next 12-24 hours. No need to fight, I am honest, and data & facts are not personal issues with me.

> The "engineer" is still ignoring the first phase of re-entry -- where the majority of the velocity was absorbed by the Martian atmosphere.

No, I don't ignore it, you ignore it. The MSM was conflicting on the data as I pointed out with links. There is no way the upper Martian atmosphere slowed the unit down from 13,000mph to 900mph as the HuffPost photo page stated. I don't need to comment on it, because it is just absurd. Just as absurd as opening a parachute wired to a 7500lb device at 900mph. I am not the one that must put forth the extraordinary evidence. NASA supporters have that job.

Maybe not a hoax but why did they put it down in a f***

crator??

> Maybe not a hoax but why did they put it down in a f*** crater?

Isn't the answer OBVIOUS? To keep the horizon limited. Keeps the fraud within a limited visual environment.

It's not a tetherball. The orbital vector is a vector, not a circular path. What you want is vector addition; the orbital velocity, plus acceleration due to gravity, minus the various factors that are de-accelerating it.

I am approximating here...during the first phase of re-entry it is, actually, an aerodyamic vehicle. But as that first approximation, any vector change is still vector addition. Which turns into heat.




I can believe it. Different engineering constraints. That's why we put parachutes on passengers (when we do). Simply put, parachutes are good at slowing -- not at stopping. An aircraft is just too fragile a thing to be dropping at parachute landing speeds. Besides...any failure catastrophic enough to prevent a glide-in is going to make a controlled parachute entry pretty near impossible as well. Especially since several of those catastrophic scenarios are "didn't see that mountain there!"

(Which is why, again, the rescue system for a high-performance aircraft involves getting pilot the heck away from the thing.)






We do. For certain probes, that is. Design constraints again. Commercial satellites are spending every gram in staying on station and operational as long as is safe. Then they are de-orbited while there is sufficient control to ensure their safe destruction. A controlled re-entry is mass expensive. You'd have to sacrifice some of the primary mission in order to achieve it. So far nobody thinks it is worthwhile paying a hefty bonus to every commercial operator to cover that...plus controlled re-entry is more risky to people on the ground (a high-speed re-entry means breakup and burnup in the upper atmosphere. A controlled re-entry means you expect the spacecraft to enter airspace INTACT).




Which was done, by the long-duration exposure experiment (among others). Again, not considered worth doing to every satellite.




Last time I read up, re-entry of the Space Shuttle was by pushing a button. The pilot's job is the last few minutes, not the first. And you are still comparing apples with apples and thinking you have oranges. Because you still think a parachute alone was used for re-entry.



The only person claiming a parachute did the entire job is you. You are fighting with yourself here.

It actually is entirely possible to land a spacecraft without a parachute OR heat shield, and it has been done many times. It would be prohibitively expensive to do it that way on Earth, however. And Curiosity the Rover would have been the size of an iPod if they had to do it that way on Mars.





A better subject for another thread. So you disbelieve the space sciences sufficiently to feel justified in being grossly ignorant about them. Fine; that explains why you can't accept that Curiosity worked. Doesn't mean I have to follow you down that same rabbit hole.



Hah. You've not made an effort to explore what I may or may not know. You've hardly read a word I've written anyhow -- you are too busy posturing.

I would say "science moves on" but that's not necessary here. There is no new science on Curiousity. Explain how the rover was landed to an aerospace engineer in 1954 and they'd have questions -- deep, technical questions -- but they would be about details, not about the validity of the basic methods.

Konstantin wrote down the basic form of the ideal rocket equation at the turn of the century. That's before either of us was born. But, somehow, I seem to understand how to calculate a delta-v, and you shy from it.

(No...I'm not gonna try to spell "Tskikovsky" right at this time of day!)

And that is really my major quibble. Be wrong, that's cool. But be not even wrong, and that's pointless. It saddens me a lot to meet an engineer who thinks he has no more to learn. There are only two kinds of people who believe they know everything there is to know about a subject, and one of them is extremely rare. The other is, sadly, all too common.



I'm not providing data. I'm passing on what I have found or believe, with appropriate caveats.

You wanna do the work, you do the proper research yourself. Anything else is make-believe.





Funny, but the shuttle orbiter seems to have solved it. As do the Soyuz capsules. As did the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects. As did (and with any luck never will again, outside of testing) ICBMs -- for which the basic techniques and materials were first worked out.

Now, if you are willing to disbelieve in all of these re-entry vehicles, that's well and good. I'll know where you stand. I'd be interested in seeing how you can justify it in terms of physics, but then you've already shown willingness to throw out any science that might disagree with your preconceptions.




Well, if you postulate perfect vacuum and ignore Relativity, you can get to any arbitrary velocity given fuel and time. The trick, for rocketry as we know it, is finding the energy to carry the propellant that is generating the velocity. Which is why staging.

But again you are making up a claim. No-one is saying Curiosity went from orbital velocity to resting on the surface without expending any propellant mass. Nor is anyone saying that the entire journey was made by parachute.



Aha. So you DON'T know how Apollo, Gemini, Soyuz...any of those craft landed. Yet you seem to understand how the Shuttle Orbiter did a similar (though much smaller) trick.

And, no, I didn't say it was destroyed. Let me amplify my original remark; when I last visited Smithsonian Air and Space, sometime in the late 80's, the Apollo 11 CM they have there struck me as being quite dirty, and having had several of the systems/panels/etc removed (and various other damage was visible). For all I know it has been extensively restored since then.

It is not destroyed. It is not the only CM on display. It is not the only part of the Apollo spacecraft on display in a museum.