Van Allen Belts

The radiation, doubters say, was lethal. The dosimeters, NASA says, disagree.

The radiation belts are real and lethal in the wrong orbit at the wrong duration — that much the doubters have right. The Apollo answer is trajectory and time: translunar injection threaded the belts' thinner margins in under two hours, and crew dosimeters recorded about 1 rem average per mission, published in NASA's own radiation reports. The stronger version of the doubt — Orion engineers in 2014 describing the belts as a problem 'we must solve before we send people through' — is a real quote about modern electronics and longer exposures, endlessly clipped out of context. The file survives on that clip.