A different look at it

[mikejohnson]

Even though we have all these technicalities with hoaxes and truths, so how many people would it take to do all these moon landings?and there was more then just one!! i think a few thousand.So all these people have kept it secret? no way,and to my knowledge nobody of any credit has come forward, people just arent built that way here.I wonder how much money one could get if they came forward with some real proof of a hoax? it would be millions. but no one has yet !!!!

[Abaddon]

AFAIK, It stands at roughly 400,000, all of whom must be party to the lunacy.

[LunarOrbit]

AFAIK, It stands at roughly 400,000, all of whom must be party to the lunacy.

And that's just the people who worked for NASA or it's contractors during the Apollo years. It doesn't include the people who would have had to be brought into the hoax in the years since in order to maintain it. The people responsible for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, for example, would have had to be made aware of the hoax before they discovered it on their own.

[gillianren]

I still say that not all 400,000 would have had enough information to work out that it was a hoax.  That number includes everyone who worked on the program, no matter what function they served.  I do believe that at bare minimum tens of thousands would have had to have known, but the women who did the actual fabrication of space suits probably didn't know if they would work or not.  The people who designed them, yes, but not the people who made them.  All they could say for sure was that they made what they were told to exactly as they were told to, and it met the standards they were given.  I don't think they knew whether that would create a working suit.

[ka9q]

If the suits didn't actually work (because the program was fake) you have to hand it to NASA for adding little touches like sending the astronauts to the factories where they were made to tell the workers that their lives would depend on how well they did their jobs.

[smartcooky]

I still say that not all 400,000 would have had enough information to work out that it was a hoax.  That number includes everyone who worked on the program, no matter what function they served.  I do believe that at bare minimum tens of thousands would have had to have known, but the women who did the actual fabrication of space suits probably didn't know if they would work or not.  The people who designed them, yes, but not the people who made them.  All they could say for sure was that they made what they were told to exactly as they were told to, and it met the standards they were given.  I don't think they knew whether that would create a working suit.

Its not just the people at the Cape and Mission Control who would have needed to be in on it (as well as the astronauts of course). Even if we assume that all the different contractors that had vital parts to play (Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed etc) were part of the fakery, there were people of all nationalities, both professional and amateur, all over the world who were involved in tracking the vehicle from launch to the Moon to splashdown.

Radio engineers at places like the CSIRO's Parkes Observatory (Australia) and the DSN Stations in California, Madrid (Spain) and Canberra (Australia) could not have helped but notice if the transmission delays were off (which they would have been).

Furthermore, the scientists at Jodrell Bank tracked the Apollo 11 descent stage all the way to the lunar surface; in fact....

It is interesting to note just how precise the measurements by Jodrell Bank were. Not only was the observatory able to receive data from the spacecraft, it was also able to pinpoint the region of the moon they were located in and to measure their speed and trajectory using measurements of the Doppler shift, combined with highly accurate signal vector and other measurements. They were even able to detect when the LM abruptly stopped descending to the lunar surface and began to climb in altitude. This was the result of Neil Armstrong taking manual control of the Lunar Module to find a suitable landing site, after noting that the site that the automated system was headed for was strewn with large boulders

http://depletedcranium.com/fascinating-recording-of-apollo-11-at-jodrell-bank-released/

[gillianren]

If the suits didn't actually work (because the program was fake) you have to hand it to NASA for adding little touches like sending the astronauts to the factories where they were made to tell the workers that their lives would depend on how well they did their jobs.

Sure.  It's a nice PR touch, certainly.  However, it doesn't indicate that the people doing the manufacturing knew anything more than they did before the astronauts got there.  What's more, there were also people involved in Apollo according to official calculations that didn't have anything to do with direct safety in any way.  Does the 400,000 figure include the people who made the food?  What about the patches?  The other bits of astronaut wear?  I've always assumed it does, since that figure is given as everyone who worked on Apollo.  Remember, I've never argued that Apollo wasn't real, because of course it was.  But I think claiming that everyone who worked on Apollo would have known if it was fake simply isn't true.  I think a substantial percentage--fifty percent, even?--would have known, and that alone makes the conspiracy impossible, even before you get the people who can verify and didn't work on the project.  But not everyone could have called hoax.

[raven]

The trouble is if they didn't know it was fake, they'd do their best to make real things that would actually do the real job of getting people to the moon. These weren't drones putting together predetermined blue-prints. Many were among the smartest people in the world at the time.

[Andromeda]

The trouble is if they didn't know it was fake, they'd do their best to make real things that would actually do the real job of getting people to the moon. These weren't drones putting together predetermined blue-prints. Many were among the smartest people in the world at the time.

That's exactly what Jason and I said once when we were discussing the minimum number of people who would have to know, if it was a hoax.  You end up with either thousands of people knowing and never saying anything, or engineers building equipment that would actually go to the moon...

[Jason Thompson]

The trouble is if they didn't know it was fake, they'd do their best to make real things that would actually do the real job of getting people to the moon. These weren't drones putting together predetermined blue-prints. Many were among the smartest people in the world at the time.

I don't think Gillianren is referring to the engineers building the hardware, but the other people not so intimately involved with the nuts and bolts of the program. Yes, if you tell Grumman to build you a lunar module and don't tell them it doesn't have to work, they will build you a working one because that's what engineers do, and if you have a working lunar module there seems no sensible reason not to use it. If you tell people to work on making food packages for manned space flight and don't tell them they don't have to go into space after all, then yes, they give you suitable food packages, but does that matter? They still don't need to know if those packages they make are actually going into space. If you get a subcontractor to give you a working gyroscopic navigation platform they don't need to know its never going into space to build you one, and it could find its way onto something like an unmanned spacecraft and they wouldn't have to know because the platform would be the same in either case.

So it's not a case of everyone having to be in on it, just of so many having to be in on it to render it absurd.

[gillianren]

Many of them were among the smartest people in the world, and doubtless those are people who would have known it was a fake.  As I said, I absolutely agree that huge numbers of people would have known.  I just also think that a lot of people working on Apollo wouldn't have known or had to have known.  But does some random guy working a food dehydrator count in the 400,000?  How about the person who made the packaging the food went into?  The person who sewed the suits the astronauts wore while in the capsules?  The people who built the launch tower?  Not designed, mind you, but built.  They knew how to do their jobs, and they did their jobs right, but that doesn't mean they knew that doing their jobs right was required in order to send men to the Moon.  In several cases, it arguably wasn't.  I still don't think they did a bad job.  I think they did the best they could.  But I also think that there were plenty of people who had no idea how "the best they could" tied into landing men on the Moon.

[raven]

That's exactly what Jason and I said once when we were discussing the minimum number of people who would have to know, if it was a hoax.  You end up with either thousands of people knowing and never saying anything, or engineers building equipment that would actually go to the moon...

I think even some conspiracy theorists have figured this out, which is why they cling so hard to alleged show-stoppers, like radiation.

[pzkpfw]

It makes me think of the Futurama episode where Fry becomes his own Grandfather.

There's a bit where the set for "faking the Moon landing" gets destroyed, so President Truman tells the officials nearby that they'll just have to "invent" NASA and go to the Moon for real.

The mind boggling effort of designing and making all the stuff to fake going to the Moon is so great (especially when no one at the time or later can be allowed to see through the fakery by determining something wouldn't really function properly), why not just go there?

[Zakalwe]

The mind boggling effort of designing and making all the stuff to fake going to the Moon is so great (especially when no one at the time or later can be allowed to see through the fakery by determining something wouldn't really function properly), why not just go there?

[Grashtel]

The mind boggling effort of designing and making all the stuff to fake going to the Moon is so great (especially when no one at the time or later can be allowed to see through the fakery by determining something wouldn't really function properly), why not just go there?

A favorite crack theory of mine about Apollo is that it was originally intended to be a hoax but in the process of doing a realistic build up to it they ended up building actual working hardware to do it so going through with the missions for real became a better idea.