Gettin' Laid Gettin' Paid: We Never Went to the Moon pp. 28-36

“If you can’t make it, fake it.”—Old Aerospace Saying

If anyone is reading this book earnestly, they should immediately be turned off by the opening sentence of chapter 4. Firstly, this is not an old aerospace saying. This is a saying that people used to tell children if they thought that their sadness would reflect poorly on their ability to be parents (there’s a season 1 episode of The Simpsons about this). Secondly, to what does this apply? You can’t fake an airplane, I suppose you can fake a working schematic, or perhaps fudge the numbers on a test, but physics is one of those things that doesn’t care about how good the ruse is.

I’ll repeat the phrase that has become the mantra of my skeptical life: facts don’t work. This isn’t a phrase that aerospace has any providence over. The phrase is just there to feed the emotional thirst that the readers have for the conspiracy. “See? The aerospace guy says they fake things that they can’t do, it’s something all of those people do.”

It’s such a bunk thing to begin a chapter with that it’s almost impressive that this chapter has nothing to do with that saying. Kaysing has titled the chapter “Why Simulation.” Which is a grammatical war crime, but we’ll move past that. We, as the reader, assume that because of the title and the phrase we’re going to take on the subject of faking the Moon Landing, but instead we are treated with stories of how people at the Rocketdyne Propulsion Field Laboratory banged it out on the job.

Kaysing calls it the “lunchless picnic.” Engineers would take dates on picnics around the 1880 acres of the complex, “The nooks and crannies, the low-branched live oaks, the tall wild oats in the spring and people’s natural proclivities to romance took care of the rest.”

Conspiracy theorists have a weird obsession with the sex lives of other people. They have an obsession with Eyes Wide Shut style orgies, sexual liberalism, and the idea that other people might be getting laid. For all the bluster they offer about wanting to prevent “1984” from happening, they sure do miss the subplot about how sexual conservativism was used to control the state.

What bothers me about this story…other than Kaysing’s admission that the workers secretly took photographs and had them developed in the photo lab on site is how little time Kaysing had to establish the normalcy of the “lunchless picnic.” Kaysing claims that he was assigned to Rocketdyne in 1956 but by the spring of 1956 there was a “prevading climate of doom…” I’m not saying that people who think they are going to die aren’t going to have sex. Searches on Pornhub skyrocketed during the 2018 Hawaii missile alert (the infamous “this is not a drill” message). I’m just saying that the new guy usually isn’t privy to the sexual affairs of the base.

Kaysing is using the sexual behaviors of the people on the base as a contradiction to the situation that those very same people were working on ICBM engines. When Bobby and Betty go off for an afternoon quickie in a Jeep, this is between him working on some chemical formulae for the engines while she is taking a break from processing photographs of launch assemblies (that’s not me being sexist, she’s described as a photo file clerk in the book). As a set up, I kind of like it. It reminds me of the relationship between Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley in “The Imitation Game.” It’s just not very well executed, I think it’s because Kaysing doesn’t really know what he wants out of this chapter.

Instead of describing the simulation, he instead discusses DX priority clearance and how that was abused to get any kind of material that the people wanted. What Kaysing is describing is government waste. I don’t think that anyone can dispute that the government sometimes wastes money. Nothing in this chapter is a surprise. Kaysing gives three examples of people abusing the system.

The first is a lead engineer who ordered some patio supports made out of stainless steel for use in the Field Laboratory. Kaysing claims that they could have been purchased for 2$ at a local store, but they cost 90$ to the government. The second is that he could have used the photo lab for his own private use to develop a photograph of his unit for his family. The third is odd. One group successfully developed a small engine for the large Atlas cluster, and that group was transferred to a different facility 20 minutes away from the RocketDyne facility. Ok, but, the logistics people were not, so seven people were stuck at RocketDyne until someone noticed; so in the meantime, they did nothing but collect a check. While wasteful, this isn’t proof of the simulation of the Moon landing. It’s nothing. It’s just, hey the government makes monetary errors. As I said in the previous paragraph, none of this is a surprise.

While this book, so far, is laid out in a much better organized fashion than the Cooper book, it makes about as much sense as that book as well. Th chapter ends with “Oh, there’s always lots to do without having to call on your supply group for entertainment…”

He’s making an implication, but I don’t know what it is. Is it the sex from earlier? Is it building a patio? I honestly don’t know. I also have no idea why this chapter ends with a schematic of the Lunar Exploration Module (LEM) with a caption which explains that the technology hadn’t been tested in space before 1969. The next is a photo of the flight path of the Apollo landing mission, and then a list of the 85 different actions that it would need to accomplish. The caption for this list says, “Statisticians say that the completing this mission six times without a single failure is beyond probability.”

I would like to see the proof of that claim, but I can also point out that six times without failure isn’t counting Apollo 13.

The broader point that I want to make is that nothing in this chapter points to why the Moon landing was faked (as hinted in the chapter title). Nor does it imply that anything was faked until it was maked. The disconnect is because no one is reading this for proof, that’s just the veneer that we are getting slapped with.