Part One: NASA risked losing $30billion of US taxpayers money

[Robert Bruce]

I found an article written by one of NASA's ex-engineers. It is lengthy and contain three scenarios that bust the hoax theories. Each of the three parts is compelling reading. The logic used is so sound and wonderful I was left wondering why Bart Sibrel even bothered to enter the conspiratorial arena. Fool.

Acknowledgement goes to clavius.org and I copy the Conspiracy Scale section here verbatum so as not to plagiarise. The Clavius site is a dream compendium of intelligent debunking of moon landing conspiracy theorists opinions. They debunk the conspiracists opinions that a giant hoax was perpetrated on the US citizens and the rest of the world. Please go there and read the site end to end. It will clarify any rash thought you might have about the 20th July 1969 and the following five moon landings being a hoax.

PART ONE: Conspiracy of Scale

NASA had to produce an ostensibly viable lunar landing program or else risk losing $30 billion in U.S. taxpayer money.

In fact almost all that money went to the contractors who built the equipment. NASA itself doesn't build spaceships. It hires companies to build spaceships for it.

But this division of labor presents a problem for conspiracy theorists. We start with the premise that NASA wanted the public to believe it actually succeeded in landing astronauts on the moon. This is common to all conspiracy theories. Also common to nearly all theories is the assertion that no such landing took place.

The most foolproof way of convincing somebody that you did something is to actually do it. Nothing is more convincing than the truth. So if NASA had to falsify the landings, that implies that (for whatever reasons) it was impossible to actually do it. So all conspiracy theories asserting that no lunar landing took place must argue that falsifying the lunar landing was easier than actually accomplishing it.

But how to deal with those pesky contractors? I see three basic scenarios: the Huge Conspiracy Scenario, the Absolute Minimum Scenario, and the Need-To-Know Scenario.


THE HUGE CONSPIRACY SCENARIO

This variant presumes that relatively many people knew about the conspiracy, be they NASA employees or employees of the prime contractors. The advantage of this scenario to the conspiracy theory is that no actual spaceworthy hardware, aside from a rocket that went up and a command module that came down, need have been constructed. If the conspiracist contends that technological limitations prevented an actual lunar landing, this is the scenario of choice.

In short, you bring the contractor in on the scam, pay him a whole lot of money and say, "Just pretend to make some hardware, we don't care if it actually works." The well-paid contractor accepts payment for services not rendered and agrees to keep silent on the matter. It makes a public announcement to say it's been awarded a major government contract to build space hardware. (You have to do that in order to keep your stockholders happy.) And then it calls a private meeting for its employees and says, "Everybody is getting a huge bonus. I know you heard us say we're making space hardware, but that's not really what's happening. If you go along with it, you'll all be set for life."

This assumes everyone can be bought. For those employees who aren't coin-operated, threats would be in order. Employees get called into their managers' offices one-by-one and are confronted by stern-faced NASA employees who spell out what will happen to the employee and his family if he should ever tell what happened.

There are several obvious problems with this scenario.

The problem of scale. At the height of the Apollo project almost half a million people were working on it. Yet in over thirty years, not one of these half million people has come forward to say he was part of the conspiracy and provide incontestable evidence for it.
Disgruntled employees. Loyalties change. Nobody fired during the Apollo project tried to retaliate against his former employer by revealing the dirty little secret.

No evidence of reward. The hundreds of thousands of people who worked on the Apollo project are scattered across the country now, most of them enjoying retirement. Where is the evidence of the fantastic wealth resulting from their payoffs? Where are the mansions, the sports cars? In order for a payoff to be an incentive, it must be considerably more than what the payee would otherwise receive. It has to be appealing enough to squelch hundreds of thousands of consciences. And you have to be able to spend your reward, otherwise it's no incentive.

No evidence of threat. Recall that the notions of death threats are purely conjecture. There is no evidence whatsoever of anyone being threatened with life or limb for spilling the beans. Nevertheless this is something that has to be believed in order for the conspiracy theory to work. See the discussion of Occam's Razor to understand why we must then dismiss theories than involve death threats.

No posthumous revelations. Death threats don't work on people who are already dead or about to die. A substantial number of people who worked on the Apollo project have died. Yet among these, we find no safe deposit boxes with incriminating photos or documents, no accounts of deathbed confessions.

No Boy Scouts. Where is NASA's Frank Serpico? Serpico was given considerable financial inducement to keep secret the corruption of the New York police. When that failed, he was nearly killed. Yet none of this prevented Serpico from doing what he felt was his duty.

Clearly the idea of keeping half a million or so people quiet for thirty years and counting is a very tall order.

Copyright www.clavius.org

[Robert Bruce]

Interesting that ace moon landin hoax conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel moonlights as a cab driver. He was collared for bad driving.

Jumping up and down on the bonnet of the car that supposedly caused him to drive badly, did not help his court appearance to defend the charges!