Originally Posted by
Jerrylynnb
I worked at NASA from 1968 to 1983. I was part of the ground simulation team and my area was the Saturn IVB, which comprised of the command module and the restartable J-2 rocket engine. I never doubted that the astronauts were onboard and completed the missions as advertised. Two things happened that have come back to haunt me with doubts.
First, at a large meeting of over 100 programmers they were discussing the lunar liftoff and one joker in the audience (who happened to be a friend of mine) popped a dumb question, intending as a wise-crack, as follows: "What about the abort sequence?" Now, we all knew that there was a tower on top of the command module that had rockets ready to pull the command module up and away from the Saturn rocket in case of any problems, and keep firing until the command module (with the astronauts riding inside) reached a height to where the parachutes could deploy and they would splash down safely in the waters off the cape. They never had to deploy this "abort sequence" for liftoff at the cape, but it was definitely a fully functioning sequence that was practiced often in simulations, and, when my friend asked that question (in jest), we all knew what he was talking about, and, the whole room started to laugh, due obviously to the idiocy of being able to abort liftoff from the moon. But the presenter, who I didn't know very well, didn't think it was funny, and, kept a stern look on his face until we all settled back down. Many years later, I started to wonder if perhaps the presenter knew something we didn't about not needing any abort sequence for a lunar liftoff - maybe if there were no astronauts really there to begin with that would need to be saved.
Secondly, after all the lunar missions were over, and we were all scrambling for projects to work on until the shuttle work got started up, I was offered a short term assignment to write the programs for something called, "Van Allen Belt Radiation Studies", which was a project to launch high altitude probes of sufficient height to traverse the Van Allen Belt and return, in which various life forms would be within the craft, complete with instruments to measure the effects the increased radiation would have on the life forms during their trek through the Van Allen Belt, which begins at about 400 miles up. As I read the specs, I caught myself wondering why they were conducting this study AFTER we had already gone to the moon WITH HUMANS several times. It seemed to me they had already determined the safety of traversing the Van Allen Belt, so, why spend the money to study it now with lower life forms? I asked my boss about it, who just shrugged it off, as I did also, but, years later, that question came back to haunt me. Could it be that they never actually had humans on board when they went through the Van Allen Belt (on the way to the moon), and, now that the fanfare and concomitant attention from news folks had died down, they were going to actually figure out just how safe, or dangerous, going through the belt would be for life forms? That question started to haunt me many years later, when it started looking like NASA had no plans to go higher than 400 miles with humans, and no other nation die either. WHY?
I am confident that we sent elaborate crafts all the way to the moon - I know we had the technology to do that, and I was familiar with the iterative techniques used to pinpoint where orbiting objects would be at any given time in the future, so a rendezvous was definitely something within the grasp of 1970's technology. I DO now have doubts about whether or not we actually had any life forms on board - I still wonder about that.
For me, the acid test will be if they ever take a photo of that flag, allegedly planted on the lunar surface, and show it to the whole world, with plenty of 3rd party observers with free access to the proceedings to concur that there really is a flag up there still standing.
Until then, I have to say I don't really know - and I wonder about it.