NASA Wasting Time and Money on Moon Landing Doubters

Rob Miles writes "Yahoo! News has this article about how NASA is paying aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15,000 to write a monograph gathering up materials answering the skeptics of the 1969 Apollo Moon Landing, point by point. It's a shame that even $1 has to be spent to debunk these conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands. And it's unfortunate that the nutters will see this as validation of their ridiculous claims ('if our charges weren't true, NASA wouldn't bother answering them' they'll snivel.)"

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Space fakes

[Animats]

There are a few known fakes on the Russian side. Gagarin actually bailed out of the capsule just before landing, because the capsule didn't have a good soft-land capability. But the USSR claimed he rode the capsule all the way down, because the rules for the world altitude record for aircraft require the pilot to stay with the aircraft. There were also a few unreported deaths in the early days of Soviet space flight.

On the US side, we now know that the Explorer satellite series was a cover story for the Corona spy satellites. And there was a fair amount of disinformation about the SR-71. Covering up a large supersonic aircraft making sonic booms over the US was a tough bit of spin control. On at least two occasions, there were low-altitude engine failure restarts over populated areas. One toppled a factory chimney, and the other was over downtown Salt Lake City.

Other cool stuff we know now:

• The Rosenbergs were guilty. They really were Soviet spies. The KGB archives and the Venona decrypts make this clear. The Venona transcripts also make it clear why the US Government was in a such a panic - they knew someone was transmitting important info about the atomic bomb to Moscow for a year before they figured out who it was.
• There really were Communists in the State Department during the McCarthy era. But they were useless as spies. Moscow Central wanted spies in DoD, the AEC, and research labs; they didn't care about the State Department.
• Much of the Vietnam War protest movement was Soviet-funded.