“Dust on the Moon” repeats the standard young-earth creationist falsehood about dust on the Moon:
In the summer of 1969, I was an evolutionist finishing his junior year, majoring in electrical engineering. Like many other evolutionary scientists, I feared for the safety of the Apollo XI astronauts who were about to land on the moon.
I knew that cosmic dust fell on the Earth at a rate of 15 million metric tons per year. On Earth, that isn’t a problem. Most of it lands on the ocean and just settles to the bottom. The dust that does fall on the land gets blown (or washed) off rocks and mixed in with the soil. But on the moon, there is no atmosphere to blow it away, or water to wash it into the sea. I knew there would be a treacherous 2 billion1 year-old accumulation of dust more than 50 feet thick.
What would happen when the lunar lander tried to set down on the moon? Would its large landing pads distribute the weight enough so that it would not sink down into the dust? Would the rocket exhaust blow the dust away sideways? or would it bore a deep hole in the dust? Would the dust settle back down on the landing craft, burying it?
We were all very surprised when there turned out to be just a small fraction of an inch of dust on the moon. How could that be?
Here we have somebody either has a extremely selective memory, is willfully ignorant, or is outright lying.
Now maybe (if you the type that likes to set low expectations for quality and accuracy) it could be excused for people, like myself, who are too young to remember the landing of Apollo 11 to think that anyone was sweating about 50 feet of dust on the Moon. But this guy says he was a college upperclassman at the time majoring in a technical field. NASA had already landed several spacecraft on the Moon before Apollo 11’s first manned lunar landing. And before that NASA had crashed probes onto the Moon. Those were not secret mission and were publicized at the time. No one, at the time of Apollo 11, thought the Moon had 50 feet of dust. This alone removes the credibility of this writer and the web site collecting his essay.
But wait it gets worse. The idea of 50 feet of dust on the Moon was based on an estimation of meteoric influx in the late 1950s that was way too high. Space based measurements in the early 1960s showed the earlier estimates were in error. For detailed information on this common creationist claim see this and that.
There is also a bit of a plot hole in the story presented. Do you think that NASA would have tried to land a spacecraft on the Moon if they thought it had 50 foot of dust on the surface. And would you think that Armstrong and Aldrin would have volunteered for what they thought was a certain suicide mission? I think not.
So who was surprised about lunar dust?
Let me present the footnote referenced in the quoted text:
1In those days we “knew” that the solar system was 2 billion years old. We now “know” it is 4.6 billion years old.
This is a misrepresentation of history. First of all the estimate that the Earth is 4.55 billion years old was made in the 1950s. No scientist in 1969 thought that the Earth or the Moon was 2 billion years old. (There is a chronology of the history of estimates of the Earth’s age online. Just follow the link.) And the 2 billion year estimate that existed before that time was just a crude estimation. I don’t think anyone was saying that earth was precisely 2 billion years old at time other than sloppy journalists who did not understand what they wrote.
The site goes on. You can read it for yourself. He has a diatribe about the “new” lower estimate of meteoric influx being inconsistent with the Earth being able to form. I guess he cannot figure out that is it not a constant over time. Nor can be bothered to learn about what he is attacking. Because if he did, he would not make that objection.