I post this in GQ in hope it will attract answers as factual as possible, and not deteriorate into another “NASA moon pictures faked” thread.
Last night I was watching a great Australian film called “The Dish” - all about how a small outback town helped in the Apollo 13 effort by broadcasting pictures of the moon landings back to earth. In the film, there are several interesting montage sequences of original 1960s footage of the space race. One shot shows a state funeral type thing, with a coffin draped in a US flag.
I asked my friend (old enough to have lived through that era) about that. He mentioned there is another film - based either on ULs or “leaked” information - about how the Russians originally got to the moon first, but the four cosmonauts couldn’t get off. The Americans also sent up a solo man crew, and he sees the dead Russians, and you never find out if he gets off or not (but the implication is not).
Apparently this film was based on “leaked information” or downright conspiracy theory that the Russians did get four to the moon first, and also that America did send up one astronaut to the moon, but never got him back, and hushed him up. I know there are some transcripts of hacked satellite radio stuff of Russia’s space programme, and that it is fairly widely accepted that there were many undisclosed accidents in their programme.
Does anyone have any links to sites, or further information, about Russia actually getting to the moon first, but it being covered up?
Or of any cover-ups by NASA of accidents in space?
While there were a good number of casualties in the Soviet space program, they generally were quite open about them. Something like getting to the moon isn’t something they would cover up - they would have said that something unpredictable went wrong after they landed and resulted in the loss of four brave cosmonauts. It doesn’t pass the logic test.
Obviously, if the film showed original 1960s footage of an astronaut’s funeral, there couldn’t have been a cover-up. Further, there couldn’t have been an astronaut left on the moon, or else he couldn’t have had a funeral back on Earth.
It was probably taken at the funeral of the Apollo One astronauts.
You’re asking for someone to prove a negative, sort of like Kreskin saying at the end of “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” “Can you prove this didn’t happen?”
No - I realise the funeral obviously wasn’t of the “missing man on the moon” - if he at all existed.
It was the film combined with this - http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030117.html - column of Cecil that really got me wondering. I find it highly unlikely that the US would try and cover up a disaster (let alone succeed in doing so).
But Cecil’s column suggests there were cover ups on the Russian side.
NASA is a huge industry that involves many outlets. For them to hide something without others exposing them, would be near to impossible in my opinion.
Add to that the fact that all NASA flights went off with tons of publicity, with reporters and cameras filming every aspect. I even believe that back then the networks had reporters at the Cape every day. You can’t exactly launch a rocket without attracting attention, so there was no way to do it secretly. The people living in Cape Canaveral/Kennedy/Canaveral knew when a space shot went up, and anything going up secretly would be noticed very fast.
The Russians were better able to preserve secrecy, since they controlled the press. That was how they were able to cover up the deaths of their cosmonauts.
The big story is that NASA has been landing on the moon since the 1920’s. The von Braun V-2 business was just a coverup for the big American program. There is a massive lunar base just over the horizon on the other side of the moon, and NASA has been covering up its moon shots for years. The Ariane 5 rocket blew up because NASA sabotaged it. It was actually a spy rocket to photograph the lunar colony. The Russians have a 30-year agreement to ship Vodka to the moon inside the “fuel” tanks of the upper stage of its rockets. There is a set of golf courses, and the ultra-rich fly there regularly to play 18 craters. Why else would NASA invent a lunar golf cart and send an astronaut there with a golf ball and club? It was a proof-of-concept for a consortium of wealthy investors. Hugh Hefner has a playboy club there complete with bunnies. With the 1/6th gravity it is very popular! Cuba has secretly been providing cigars to NASA for the moon colony, which is why NASA has facilities located in Florida. You see it all fits together. Prove it’s wrong! You can’t.
Sure, NASA covered something up. They inserted the article “a” into the recording of Neil Armstrong saying, “that’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong flubbed his line.
To expand on what RealityChuck said about publicity:
I’m currently reading Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz (the dude played by Ed Harris in the Apollo 13 movie). For the first launch of an American into space, there were three finalists: Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Gus Grissom.
On the actual morning, May 2, 1961… well, here’s Kranz himself (starting on page 47):
(The launch was ultimately successfully carried out on May 5, after another one-day postponement.)
The idea that any secret of serious magnitude could be kept under such aggressively competitive scrutiny simply defies credulity. And to think that an American astronaut might have reached the moon but was unable to return, and that all of this was covered up, when even the simple identity of an astronaut couldn’t be hidden, ranges past fantasy into delusion, in my opinion.
It always tickles me - somehow we didn’t have the ability to go to the moon, or undertake this extremely technically daunting task, but we had the ability somehow to fake it all, and then to keep up the charade for all these years without anyone finding out. The logic of these assertions continues to escape me. You can fool some of the people over and over…
. . . not to mention the THOUSANDS of people that worked for NASA. There wasn’t a whole lot that was secret about the operation which is the way that Eisenhower wanted it when he decided to get the space program away from the military.
I think where people get confused about space flight is that they think of it in terms of science when they should think of it as an engineering project. When you get enough people and money together to accomplish a project it is probably doable even if it is daunting. Are the pyramids faked? Is the Chunnel a movie set? If you have the math down and can devote the resources there’s no reason why we can’t put a man on the moon.
Intellectually, it strikes me that a DVD player is a more astounding accomplishment than building a contraption that can take men into space.