Reply #355: The Lemon... Maybe He Was Gonna Have Some Fish Sticks...

[WillyT]

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Then there's the mysterious fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in 1967. Was it due to Grissom's being a thorn in the side of NASA? Well, if so, there was a much neater and less messy solution to the problem. Ground him. There was more than enough reason - Grissom lost his capsule on his first flight! When Scott Carpenter overshot his landing site by 300 miles on the second Mercury orbital flight, he vanished from the space program (he's still alive and well, by the way). Somehow Grissom redeemed himself well enough to get a second chance aboard a Gemini mission, and he was set to become America's first three-time space traveler when he was killed. This is a very strange way to treat a threat.

Okay, let's say for some reason Gus had to be terminated. The astronauts were constantly involved in dangerous survival training, not to mention getting their flying hours in. There were any number of low-key ways to do him in without killing two other astronauts and destroying a perfectly good Apollo capsule. An ejection seat malfunction during a routine training flight would have done it nicely. Destroying the Apollo capsule in 1967(!) put the goal of reaching the moon by 1970 in grave jeopardy. If anyone involved in the re-engineering failed to make schedule, the deadline would be missed. If NASA tried to rush things by approving a patently unready capsule, it would have raised an impossible number of red flags. So the conspiracy had to trust that thousands of independent agencies and contractors would get it all together in time, because all of these people still had to be kept ignorant of the conspiracy. A conspiracy that trusts - now there's a novel concept.

Interestingly enough, all of the Apollo astronauts themselves stayed hale and hearty for many years after their flights. Not a single one, apparently, was tempted to get rich and famous by blowing the whistle, and none even strayed enough from the party line to be a threat to NASA.

"The Experts Agree, the Answer is 250,000 miles Away"

The program ends by restating the pros and cons of the conspiracy theory, then finishes with the quote above.

No, the experts agree we landed on the moon. Some other folks disagree, but none of them can remotely be called experts. This is the well-known "experts don't agree, so pick whatever idea you like" scam of the pseudoscientist.

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Much more: http://www.uwgb.edu/DutchS/PSEUDOSC/ConspiracyTheoryDidWeGototheMoon.htm

:evilfrown: