Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I want to know what he thought the first ten Apollo flights were all about. 
> It might even make sense if it was a one-time flight that went to the moon 
> on the first try, but why all the *other* launches, including a faked Apollo 
> 13 screw-up?

  That's one thing I find funny about the conspiracy theories. When you
read websites dedicated to them, you get the impression that NASA went to
the moon only once, faking the whole thing, and that's it. They don't
explicitly say it, but most websites keep conveniently quiet the fact that
NASA went there six times. If one would not know better, one could easily
get the impression that it was just one flight, and that's it.

  Any reasons the conspiracy theorists give for faking the first moon mission
don't make too much sense for the other five. If NASA had, according to the
conspiracy theorists, already successfully faked the first mission and
accomplished whatever they wanted to accomplish, why risk faking it again?
Assuming it was all faked, each new mission would have greatly increased the
risk of someone discovering the hoax. So why take the risk? Doing it twice
would have not been wise, three times would have been very audacious...
Six times would have been pure madness. It would have been very easy to
give technical reasons why it would have been too dangerous to go again,
so there really wasn't any need for any further faked missions.

  Conspiracy theorists also conveniently keep quiet about one thing: That
the USSR was watching the NASA really, really closely. All this happened
at the height of the Cold War, when both the USA and the USSR were arming
themselves with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire planet ten
times over, and both were *really* suspicious of each other, especially
with things like sending rockets to orbit (which could pose a real security
threat). And of course they were in a race to the Moon: It was all about
international PR. The one who got there first would get all the credit and
glory. It was a really important thing to both.

  So you can be pretty certain that the USSR was watching all the missions
really, really carefully, and that they would have loved nothing more than
to expose a hoax, to ridicule the USA internationally. The USSR certainly
did have enough equipment to survey the flights, all the radio signals and
everything. I wouldn't be surprised if they had been tracking the spacecrafts
all the way to the Moon and back (because, after all, it was the Cold War
and it was a security threat if the USA wanted to put something nasty up
there to get a weapon superiority).

  Yet not a single claim of hoax from the part of USSR. They were ok with it.
They didn't like losing the race, but they admitted defeat.

  Many people think that a hoax by NASA is *plausible*. However, due to the
above reasons and many others, personally I think that a hoax would have been
absolutely and physically *impossible*. It was simply not possible to do it,
with all the eyes watching the whole thing (the USSR, the rest of the world,
and all the third-party US companies and NASA employees themselves).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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