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292 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
tography, huge amounts of tape and film had to be expended. NASA seemed
to do precisely that. As Harry Hurt put it,"... Project Apollo was one of the
most extensively documented undertakings in human history .. ." 9
Despite this alleged fact and the fact that the NASA 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 relatively liberal 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 I, 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 verified the NASA rite of passage by
condemning 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.
Russian capsules were closer to being compressed air tanks than flimsy
space capsules. Their ships had sufficient wall strength to maintain nor-