Page 91 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

While the Saturn 1 booster was being tested and modified, NASA had arrived at what it believed to
be a feasible plan for sending men to the Moon and back. Saturn V would launch into space the
following items: three astronauts; one Command Module, containing the astronauts and the
instrumentation; one Service Module, attached to the Command Module, carrying life-support
systems and fuel for its own engines; one Lunar Module, with two engines and fuel, to carry two men
from the Command Module to the Moon's surface and back; another rocket stage and fuel to
complete the push out of the Earth's atmosphere; a third rocket stage to deliver the vital Trans Lunar
Injection which would accelerate the Command Module and its contents out of Earth's orbit; plus
a few other bits and pieces. NASA originally considered using a single craft both to make the
journey and land on the Moon, but had calculated that the chosen method delivered a superior fuel
to weight ratio and would therefore result in a lower payload overall. Altogether, the package of
items weighed in at around 280,000 pounds, just within the projected capacity of the Saturn V...
[Source: http://www.serendipity.li/more/myth_of_apollo.htm#5]

For comparison purposes, the declared launch mass of the Apollo 8 mission which took place in
December, 1968, was 63,650 pounds. This is only 22% of the mass NASA claims to have sent into
space one year later. NASA had never demonstrated the ability to send more than a small fraction
of the mass of the equipment needed for the lunar missions into space. The Myth of Apollo continues:

The Mercury program had been continuing, running alongside the more ambitious Gemini program,
which sent two-man crews into Earth orbit for the first time. These programs used the old Atlas
Centaur or the newly recruited Titan, a modified ICBM... In many ways then, the Apollo Program
was still on course. It just needed the all-important Saturn 1 rocket, so beset by problems over the
previous six years, finally to succeed...

If the Apollo 1 disaster and the unreliability of the Saturn 1 rocket seemed a major setback, the
dismal progress of the Saturn V posed an even greater threat to Apollo's success. The Saturn V's
awesome power was derived from five separate engines (the F-1), each delivering 1.5 million pounds
of thrust, more than an entire Saturn 1. These engines were proving enormously problematic. Indeed
Rocketdyne, the company responsible for building them, had not been able to build a single F-1
engine that could reach full power without exploding or becoming uncontrollable. By 1967, the
Saturn V had not achieved a single successful launch despite over five years of development.

I believe this problem was so great it effectively made the successful fulfilment of Kennedy's promise
impossible. I believe it was this problem that caused NASA, through its inability to admit to failure,
to shelve indefinitely its plans to go to the Moon and thereafter focus its efforts simply on convincing
the world that it had done so...

Instead of announcing to the world the cancellation of the Apollo Program however, NASA decided
on a different strategy. Publicly Apollo would be seen to continue and, ultimately, succeed. Its
missions would in reality only go into Earth orbit; evidence that they achieved any more than this
would be faked. It was a desperate strategy, fraught with risks. But the political risks of telling the
truth were clearly calculated to be much greater....

The mysterious rise and fall of the Saturn V rocket