Faking the Moon Landing

 

Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11

Faking then Moon Landing

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Growing up, space was always something that was front and center for me. In part, am just naturally curious and my mind likes to wander and the infinite expanse of the far off untouched universe is a great place to do that. But my upbringing of course played a huge role as well. My parents both worked in Aerospace, something I myself started doing at the age of 19 and still do. Growing up my father in particular would always tell us how incredible seeing the moon landing on TV in 1969 was, and go on to share all sorts of random facts about the various rocket programs that led up to Apollo. Legendary astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Al Shepard, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, were regular mentions when the topic came up. 

To this day the picture of Ed White performing the first American space walk in 1967 on the Gemini IV mission is one of my all time favorite images, of anything. I also remember there being a large model of the Saturn V complete with lunar lander, being slowly destroyed by me and my brothers as it was used as a toy, I remember seeing Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks in Theaters, and scoffing the oddball claim that the moon landing was a hoax and any brief mention that idea might get on Coast to Coast AM or the History Channel late at night. The moon landing was always just a fact. And not just a fact, but a defining moment or act of American preeminence, a symbol of some sort of moral right or even imperative to the be dominant superpower of the planet.

But as Ive gotten older, I have increasingly become skeptical of Government, and along with it anything the government has said or done or hinted at touching. After all, most of the BIG conspiracies that get talked about involve the feds one way or another. Whether its Aliens, the JFK assassination, Epstein Island, the COVID 19 fiasco... the list goes on and on. Even President Ronald Reagan is famously quoted saying “The most terrifying words in the english language are Im from the government Im here to help”.

With that said, most of my skepticism of government doesn't even come from conspiracy theories. Its the oddball trip to the DMV, paying taxes, poorly maintained roads, politicians flagrantly lying on TV, schools teaching utter nonsense, insane foreign policy that saw many in my generation deployed to the Middle East, and at the moment has us flirting with an all out war with the other leading nuclear powers of earth, and even my own experience working in a production environment you really get to see that the world, well it really is just ordinary people. Most of them don't change much from High School, they just tend to have more complicated circumstances and more money to screw up.

Sigh, I digress, this podcast is about the moon...

Well NASA is a government agency though, one that does not always but certainly is used as a political tool. After all, the “space race” was about beating the Soviets, and the Space Shuttle, and especially the current SLS Rocket programs are bloated pork projects that probably have more to do with protecting jobs and corporate handouts than any real testable goal...

So should I just accept the moon landing because they said so? In this context, it can be tough. I won't rehash everything, but I assume you're familiar with all the major claims about the alleged faking of the moon landing, it was filmed in a studio using bungee cords, it and the astronauts couldn't survive passage through the radiation belt, you cant communicate through the radiation belt, it was a distraction from the Vietnam war, it was to bankrupt the soviets, no stars in the photographs, where are all the moon rocks, how could we lose the technology, or why cant we rebuild it, along with a myriad of other claims about little issues here and there. Even if you could or do disprove one thing another one can be latched onto.

It can be an overwhelming subject and taken at face value would seem to be stacked against the moon landing being real. So I think in recent years, among my own millennial generation the idea it was faked is probably more popular than ever. You know I cant blame them, as a child of the late 80s, my entire life has been one of non-stop war, political lies from a generation of rulers that can barely operate a cell phone, domestic conflict, increasingly short boom and bust financial cycles, glaring federal deficits, unstable and now not even guaranteed social programs that may not be around in a decade, decay of the family unit, an onslaught of woke, the disappearance of a good paying entry level factory or sales job, and and a country that increasingly resembles some distant globalist leviathan empire more than the patriotic country my Father so happily reminisces about seeing land on the moon... Was it all really just an elaborate lie to placate the masses?

I certainly became more tolerant of the conversation over the years. And it even became a regular part of lingo at work, let me explain. I work at a large Corporate Aerospace Manufacturing company. And I think anyone who has worked at a large company or government, can get my next point: Often times you will be involved in a meeting that ultimately just results in another meeting. Each person in the meeting seeking to defend their little section of the project and point the finger at someone else, still more people exist merely to be middle men between groups. No one seems to actually DO anything except maybe one or two people (who do it slowly) and the rest of them seem top mostly just grift on to that. You have to realize that in many cases like this the people in the meeting may all have 100k salaries, health insurance, and a retirement... When I encounter meetings or projects that seem like this, at the end I hang up and say something like “And this is exactly why we never landed on the moon”.

I say it tongue in cheek, but I do mean it. Our bloated bureaucracies consume precious resources and seem to only produce more red tape to slow down the people who do or could actually work. How could a society that is ran like this produce anything as truly groundbreaking as the Apollo program?

But then one day a friend of mine sent me a podcast he thought I might enjoy. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck was interviewing Charlie Duke, who was the youngest man to walk on the moon, being age 36, the same age as me today when he boarded Apollo 16.

Check it Out!

https://www.glennbeck.com/glenn-beck-podcast/apollo-legend-debunks-moon-landing-theories

In this episode, which I will link to in the description and at loreandlegends.net, and oh by the way it isn't political for those of you who may not care for Glenn Beck, Charlie discusses at some length to speed and efficiency of the Apollo program, the incredible hands on nature of Wehrner Von Braun and the engineering staff, and a make or it work or move on attitude, and the willpower to “get it done”.

Even more incredible us Charlie mentions being at NASA post Apollo, in a position where he could probably stick around and fly a space shuttle, but being so burned out by the new red tape and bureaucracy that had taken over that he just couldn't do it anymore...

And it all came into focus for me, this is the real reason why we cant land on the moon today, and we really did “lose” the technology in some sense and I can explain why with my own first hand experiences in Aerospace manufacturing. 

So let me start with an Example. The F22 Raptor is the current preeminent air superiority fighter plane on planet earth. Development began in the 1980s but slowed as the soviet union collapsed. The first plane eventually flew in 1997. Initially some 700+ aircraft were desired but it would ultimately be cut to less than 200 with production ending in the year 2011.

Just a few years later it becomes apparent that nations like China and Russia are quickly moving to establish peer or near peer adversaries to the now aging F22. So congress and the USAF look into restarting production of the F22, but theres a catch, that supply chain doesn't exist anymore, much of tooling has disappeared, the experienced workers have all moved on, and the manufacturing space itself is now occupied by new programs. The cost of restarting production for something you have already built once before is now tremendous obstacle and must be weighed with putting the money towards something more up to date than an aircraft that was originally penned in the late 1980s...

For those of you who don't have the background in manufacturing something like an airplane, it is an incredibly complex machine with thousands upon thousands of parts, many of those parts are things that are built by smaller companies using specialized machines and molds we call “tooling”, all of these parts make there way to the assembly areas you might catch a glimpse of in pictures and are assembled into a final product. In most cases a good assembly mechanic might take 5 years to be truly proficient, and the reality is that you cant just replace them with robots as robots just are not good for all tasks, and have limited functionality relative to a competent human who can do various jobs on the fly. 

So between 2011 and 2017 we quote unquote “forgot” how to build to the F22 Raptor.

That may seem to simple and it probably is, but let me promise you something like Apollo is that on steroids we couldn't possibly imagine. You may not appreciate that blueprints in that era were physical paper drawings that a person made. There were no computers, no digital library and no catia. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of even more low rate one off production parts from long defunct suppliers made on tooling that has been long since smelted back down rather than consuming precious floor space. In fact one of the buildings in Tulsa Oklahoma that once produced bombers and pieces of the Apollo rocket, now producers yellow school buses. When a seasoned engineer or mechanic leaves, all their years of learned experiences referred to as “tribal knowledge” just walk out the door. Even if you had the floor space and all the proper jigs and tools and willing and available supply chain from raw material to finished products no one knows how to put it together, and let me tell you that “just read the instructions” is usually not enough.

I can also attest to the fact that this same problem plagues something even younger than Apollo, the B1 bomber which is re-emerging as a strategic asset, but is a product of the 1970s and 80s. And a rush to re-engineer replacement parts is well under way. 

Even worse, look at all the problems Boeing has had with the 737. An aircraft that entered service in 1968, and has been in some form of continuous production ever since, we almost forgot how to build something we never stopped building. I can also share an observation that the inevitable brain drain that is happening as the boomer generation retires is very real, the lost 

covid 19 years only exacerbated this problem, and an infatuation or feeling of obligation towards abstract 4 year college degrees has made much of the Millennial and Gen Z generation squander there 20s in useless programs all while installing an unrealistic bias against blue collar or merit based work. There is often not enough Gen X or “elder millennials” who lived the last analog childhoods to make up the difference. As if that wasn't enough, American corporations like Boeing are ran by finance people more interested in a near term stock payout than a long term stable, forward pushing manufacturing company aiming to advance the human condition. It should come as no surprise that in the context of a moon program, Boeing of recent failed stranded astronaut fame, is also the lead contractor on the often forgotten SLS rocket program which is years behind schedule, and severely over budget with only one unmanned launch despite being in some ways a rearrangement of the space shuttle hardware. 

Its all true and I see it everyday. American manufacturing is not in good shape and there is no magic fix. We did land on the moon, there is plenty is evidence including pictures of the sites from recent orbiter spacecraft. It was just a different time, in a different culture, with vastly different priorities and motivations and population.

The reason we can't land on the moon today, and the reason so many more people seem open to the idea it was all a hoax, is because it is hard to look at the state of American manufacturing and imagine that we could do something at that scale, even at those prices adjusted for inflation, and think we could pull it off, let alone pull it off and endure catastrophic failures like they did with Apollo 1 and Apollo 13. 

But thats a pretty bleak ending so I cant leave it there. There are some very bright spots, Elon Musks SpaceX is certainly one of them. And whether you like Twitter or X or not, the ability to eliminate some 80% of the staff and somehow do more business and roll out more features is incredible. The idea that this might be carried over to congress is incredibly encouraging.

In a recent interview with a BBC reporter in regards to an absurd tax on farmers in the UK Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame made a comment about firing any government worker who's job cant be clearly explained. 

A desire for a return to merit, a cut the bull crap and move on mentality is growing and getting more and more socially acceptable. And in terms of conspiracies, there's a chance we do get answers on JFK, Epstein, 9/11, and even some UFO stuff in the coming years, and see the USA once again land on the moon. Then just maybe the real conspiracies wont be whether or not we landed on the moon, but who in what systems or institutions were holding us back all along...

Hope to be back at the podcast regularly in 2025! Thanks for sticking with me!

That's all for this episode, Cya Next time