Zixinus wrote:
A theory that says that NASA hired some undiscovered talent movie actors, a couple of guys from Hollywood to make a Moon scene and none of these people talk because they don't have to pay income tax for years and because they are given a fat, rich paycheck isn't exciting. It's boring and therefore, less worthy of attention, thus less worthy of consideration. A juicy tale about secret killings and massive conspiracies of powerful and paranoid nutters is much more interesting to talk about at the office water cooler.
It would also make no sense: somebody built the Saturn V, which always launched with a massive audience.
I had once tried to figure out the minimum number of people who would need to be in on the conspiracy. Of course I failed, since I can't really be bothered to check how many engineers worked for Grumman and other companies on the Apollo project, but even with easily available data, the number quickly spirals out of control.
Let's consider the question: Who would need to know the entire thing was a sham? Certainly, all the astronauts who allegedly landed on the moon. You have seven lunar missions, six landings and one abort - that's 21 people who need to be bribed or threatened into lying for the rest of their lives in just the primary crews. I suppose backup crews wouldn't need to know.
Then there's the top movers: a conspiracy that large needs to be organized. Under a minimalistic theory, NASA built all the hardware as if it was real, but had no actual capability to land on the moon and return from it. Let's put aside the fact it's a retarded theory: under it, we can cut the number of astronauts to 18, since Apollo 13's crew didn't need to know, and none of the engineers, managers etc. didn't either, since they lived under the impression that they were, in fact, shooting for the moon.
But! Wait, we need to fake the photos, right? There's about 6000 frames from a lunar surface. Let's go minimalistic again: we need a studio, props and at least one actor, a photographer and lightning tech to make the baseline photographs, then somebody to make them look as if they were made on the Moon. There's no way one person can fake 6000 frames in reasonable time ; Even if it takes a mere 10 minutes to arrange the photo, airbrush it, add details, shoot and develop the fake, that's 1000 man-hours, or 125 working days for a single person. A more realistic figure is something like an hour per frame, though. An you need someone to supervise the process and catch any mistakes before they get reprinted in the press.
And then you need someone to manage the archive during the process and afterwards.
So we have 18 astronauts, three people on the set itself plus a prop man, at least two techs to fake the pics plus their supervisor, and someone managing the archives: 26 people just on the technical end of the process need to know they're faking the landings.
Ah, but we also have movies and rock samples! That adds another actor and a camera operator at the least: 28 people. We also need sound techs to manage fake transmissions in order to fool mission control: probably something like five people to make sure telemetry and chatter look believable (astronauts could do the chatter, no need to get another person in). Then you need to get a lab in which to fake the moon rocks: how many techs? Let's say merely two would be enough, though I seriously doubt it.
So, a total of 35 people is the lower limit for the
technical side of a conspiracy so ridiculously minimalistic that NASA might've just gone ahead and landed anyway, since it assumes they had all the gear in working order, just not the capability for whatever reason. And of course none of these people decided to secretely write a book about it and publish it 40 years later.
If we use a more reasonable theory, like "We couldn't get the lunar lander to work", you suddendly get an influx of hundreds of engineers, techs and managers at Grumman who need to be bought/threatened. Again, just on the technical side: what about the people who coordinated and planned it all?
Really, the way NASA handled it is totally counterproductive to building a conspiracy, which I suppose it's kind of the point: they decided to release as much material as possible to make it absolutely certain for anyone with a brain the landings happened. I mean, how do you get the Soviets to lie to the public when you give them Moon rocks that don't chemically match their own lunar soil samples (they had a small quantity of lunar dust from their Luna program)? Why give them any rocks at all?
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