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NASA has announced that the so called Orion project will be handed to aeronautics giant Lockheed Martin for a whopping 3.5 - 8.1 billion dollars. The Orion looks very much like the famous Apollo capsule and Service Module but it’s bigger and better with space for six astronauts - and it’ll be reusable. NASA’s planning to use the Orion to ship the crew back and forth from the ISS and later ship astronauts to the moon and even beyond (although I can’t think of anything more horrible than cramming six guys into a cone measuring 5.5 meters (16.5 feet) and sending them on an at least 6 month long transfer to mars!).

It’s interesting that NASA has chosen Lockheed Martin as manufacturer, considering they totally destroyed the X-33 project after spending almost a billion dollars on it. As opposed to Boeing who made the space shuttle work. The Orion will be propelled by the new Ares type rockets which can be built from “ordinary” space shuttle parts (ie. the boosters and the main fuel tank).

It’s great that NASA is spending money on space exploration - no one could be more happy than I. But I can’t help thinking about this whole “going to the moon” business could be a(nother) hoax. What I’m talking about here is the movement who claim that the legandary moonlandings was nothing more than an elobrate and carefully executed hoax.

I know a lot of you (and myself!) have a really hard time believing that. I have myself always thought the Apollo program was one of mankind’s most wonderful achievements ever. But the things I’ve seen and read have made me doubt that belief. Let’s just say I don’t have enough information to be sure either way - I’m just thinking about it out loud.

There are a lot of questions regarding the Apollo program and the missions in detail that are worth asking. Things like “how come the crew and film survived hundreds of rems of radiation in a tin can with walls only a couple of centimeters thick” and “how come it looks like the pictures are shot with fill in flashes although NASA claims they brought no extra lighting with them”. I can’t go trough all of these questions here. But you can check out the documentary What Happened on the Moon and What Happened on the Moon part 2. There’s of course a lot of other sources about this, and I admit that this documentary is only covering this issue from one angle - but it’s questions are indeed valid and at least it seeds the doubt. I also think it’s very childish of NASA having the attitude of “how dare you question one of americas greatest achievemts?!”. It’s my duty to question - it’s one of the few things I can do!
I think it’s also interesting to note that according to NASA man will walk on the moon (again) in about 15 years and with a budget of more than 200 billion dollars. This is with modern technology and knowledge. In the 1960’s they manage to plan, build and execute this same feat in 8 years - a remarkable achievement indeed. Another strange fact is that the Saturn V rocket (the classical Apollo rocket) was, at least on paper, much more powerful and economic than the later Space Shuttle. Why did they go with the Space Shuttle solution if they already had this mighty Saturn V? Maybe someone wasn’t being really honest with the specs?So why are NASA and the US so keen on going back to the moon? As they said when the program was terminated “it’s just a hunk of rock”. Although they brought thousands of samples with them they found nothing interesting on the moon at all. What makes the leaders of the US think another 200 billion would make any difference 70 years later?

Unless they never actually went there in the first place. It would make a creepy kind of sence. If one was to go there now - would one even find the launch pads of the Apollo Lunar Modules? Maybe this is something which needs to be corrected and maybe Orion could provide the answer.

I figure myself sitting in front of my TV as a 35 year old going “wait a second - this doesn’t look familiar at all”. Everything from the landing to the astronauts jumping around on the surface to the blastoff would be different in real life than what we’re shown in those legandary images.

My greatest hope is that some billionare would macgyver his own lunar programme and beat NASA to it. What would he find there? A bunch of neatly landed lunar modules and footprints and even that mooncar of their’s. Maybe he’d find nothing at all. Or maybe he’d find landers indeed but all wrecked up containing dead astronauts because of failed landings we never got to see? Maybe he’d even find the real truth… Because for some reason I can’t help thinking that Orion is, partly, an attempt at a cover up of what actually happened on the Moon.

Olle Mattsson