Rene-NASA-Mooned-America

Mass Murder or Utter Stupidity / Chap. 6 p. 42
Strangely enough, rocks were later found in Antarctica that closely resemble "Moon
rocks". In point of fact, some geologists are now positive that these rocks were blasted from
the Moon to Earth during immense meteoric impacts.
However, true-to-the-Moon photos posed a bit more of a problem. Because the 20th
century is the age of increasingly sophisticated photography, huge amounts of tape and film
had to be expended. At the time NASA seemed to do precisely that. As Harry Hurt wrote, "...
Project Apollo was one of the most extensively documented undertakings in human history
..." 9 Despite this claim and the fact that NASA's Apollo mission photo numbers seem to
indicate that thousands of pictures were taken, we keep seeing the same few dozen pictures
in all the books on space.
Using the well-developed art of Hollywood-style special effects (FX), the astronauts
could be photographed "on the Moon" in the top secret studio set up near Mercury, Nevada.
Of course, there is a bit more to great FX than having the best equipment. As in any art form,
the artists are always more important than their tools. The backbone of superb FX is lodged
in the Hollywood professionals who devote their lives to it. Lacking access to these experts,
NASA was forced to use CIA hacks — relative amateurs.
Nevertheless, they did their job well enough to pass casual inspection for many years. It
worked only because we wanted to believe! As long as we had something to hang our hats
on we could continue to have faith and ignore the anomalies in the evidence the photos
provided. It worked — for a while!
Grissom's Final Mistake
At the time of his death Grissom was one of NASA's old-timers. He was the man who, a
few short years before, certified that the astronauts had been involved in every step of the
program and had been free to criticize at will and even suggest ideas for improvements. He
was the man whose fatal error was no more than in being who he was: an independent
thinker; a free spirit who seemed to be completely unaware that NASA had wholeheartedly
opted to enact the second part of the old saying "If you can't make it, fake it!"
He had been selected as Commander of Apollo 1, the first manned flight of the Apollo
series. Grissom's crew included Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee. White flew on
Gemini 4 but Chaffee was a newcomer who had not as yet been in space or fulfilled the
NASA rite of passage by denying the visibility of stars and planets.
The Handicap
Right from the beginning, NASA was operating under a tremendous handicap. They
were in a space race with a nation who, they knew, had operational rockets that made ours
seem like tinker toys by comparison. The Soviets started their space program in capsules that
were 50 times heavier than those we were launching six months later.
Soviet capsules were closer to being compressed air tanks than flimsy space capsules.
Their ships had sufficient wall strength to maintain normal atmospheric pressure inside the
NASA MOONED AMERICA! / Rene