History Of Manned Space Flight

Apollo 18: Could NASA Launch a Secret Moon Mission?

The new film "Apollo 18" is like "The Blair Witch Project" of space travel flicks, couched as found footage shot by NASA astronauts during a secret mission to the moon in 1973. In the story, the astronauts encounter unfriendly lunar aliens, chaos ensues and NASA forever hushes the whole thing up.

It's science fiction, of course: History shows that Apollo 18, along with 19 and 20, was canceled — Apollo 17 was NASA's final lunar mission. But the new film will surely stoke conspiratorial fires about the agency's secret activities.[ NASA's 17 Apollo Moon Missions in Pictures ]

Might NASA really have launched a secret human spaceflight during the Apollo era, without anyone noticing it?

Almost definitely not.

Too many eyes and ears

"Developing the entire manned program involved 400,000 people, so to cover up the whole thing you'd have to keep them all quiet," said Craig Nelson, a space historian and author of "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon" (Viking 2009). "Just to send astronauts up in the air required a crew of 300 people. Not only did you have all of them working as part of NASA, but a huge percentage worked for other contractors, so you'd have to have hundreds of people keeping a secret forever."

According to archival records, the number of NASA employees had, in fact, dropped to around 200,000 by 1973, the year Apollo 18 was originally scheduled to take off. That's half the peak employment of 1965, but still a huge number of people to keep silent, had NASA carried out a lunar mission in secret.

Furthermore, Nelson pointed out that the space agency would have somehow had to quiet the millions of people who saw each liftoff of the Saturn 5 rocket (which delivered Apollo's lunar capsules into space) as it left the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"There's no way [NASA] could cover up a launch. They could claim that the Air Force was doing it, but even then they would have to completely disguise an Apollo mission as an Air Force satellite mission, and that would be extremely difficult," Nelson told Life's Little Mysteries , a sister site to SPACE.

Human spaceflight: Reaching for the stars | The Economist

A brief history of manned spaceflight

FIFTY years have elapsed since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lit the blue touchpaper on the era of manned spaceflight. Progress was rapid—only eight years separated Gagarin's flight from the infinitely more complicated mission that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon in 1969. Although the moon landings handed victory in the space race to America, the Soviet Union dominated manned spaceflight for the next decade, including some pioneering missions to the Salyut space stations to test the effects of long periods spent aloft. Only with the rise of the Space Shuttle programme in the early 1980s, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few years later, did America retake the crown. Manned spaceflight is now no longer a two-horse race. China first sent men up in 2003, and a year later three privately funded sub-orbital missions were made in SpaceShipOne

What a waste of money manned flights are! Can anyone tell me what the $100 billion dollar plus Space Station has done to mankind? Just trucking water and supplies costs millions and that's what most of the Shuttle trips seem to achieve. The unmanned Hubble telescope has furthered human knowledge of the Universe more than all the manned flights have done combined. Again, what a waste of tax-payer dollars when Congress is fighting over itsy-bitsy things.