Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

APPALLED AT APOLLO 173
they put together the greatest hoax in all of history, yet they forgot
to put stars in the pictures?
There’s more. It has come to light in recent years that the Soviets
were well on their way to sending men to the Moon in the 1960s
as well. Their missions never got off the ground, but the Soviets
worked very hard on them, and of course they were watching carefully
when NASA broadcast its own footage. Both superpowers had
spent billions of dollars on their respective lunar projects; national
prestige was at stake for the two countries that just a few years
before were on the verge of nuclear war. You can imagine that if
the Soviets had faked their missions and forgotten such obvious
flaws as stars in images and shadows that went in the wrong direction,
the American press would have savaged them beyond belief.
Do the conspiracy theorists honestly think that Tass or Pravda
would have done any differently to the American project? It would
have been the Soviets’ greatest victory of all time to prove that the
Americans had botched their biggest peacetime project in history,
yet even they acknowledged the truth of the Moon missions.
In the end, truth and logic prevail. America did send men to the
Moon, and it was triumph of human engineering, perseverance,
and spirit.
PPP
A postscript: after Kaysing finished his book We Never Went to the
Moon, he approached Jim Lovell with it. Lovell was the commander
of Apollo 13, and literally came close to death trying to save
his crew and his ship after an explosion crippled the spacecraft. Lovell’s
stake in the space program is almost beyond comprehension.
So you can imagine Lovell’s reaction when he read Kaysing’s
book. In the San José Metro Weekly magazine (July 25–31, 1996),
he is quoted as saying, “The guy [Kaysing] is wacky. His position
makes me feel angry. We spent a lot of time getting ready to go to
the moon. We spent a lot of money, we took great risks, and it’s
something everybody in this country should be proud of.”
Kaysing’s reaction to Lovell’s comments? He sued Lovell for
libel. In 1997, a judge wisely threw the case out of court. There’s
still hope.