00:00The standard argument of the skeptics goes something like this. The Van Allen belts are
00:05extremely dangerous. Apollo didn't have adequate shielding, so humans couldn't have flown through
00:11there. Might sound plausible to some, it just has one problem. It ignores almost everything that we
00:18know about radiation and space travel. Apollo didn't just blindly fly straight through the
00:23thickest part of the belt. NASA very deliberately plotted the trajectories so that the inner
00:29proton-rich belt was traversed as quickly as possible. The outer belt was passed through in
00:36relatively thin regions and the total time in high radiation was minimized. Apollo launched from low
00:43Earth orbit, performed the so-called translunar injection burn and then shot off toward the
00:48moon at high speed. The trajectory cut diagonally through the belts, not vertically straight through
00:54them. That makes a huge difference. An even more important factor is the time. Apollo 11, for example,
01:02took about three to four hours for the complete transit through both belts. That's all.
