Page 92 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

According to the official account, what happened next was this. NASA took the Saturn V project
away from Rocketdyne (the world's foremost rocket engineering company) and handed it over to its
own engineers. Under Wernher Von Braun's personal supervision, NASA's in-house team solved,
within a matter of months, all the technical problems Rocketdyne had grappled with for over five
years. By late 1967 NASA was claiming it had conducted very successful unmanned tests of the
Saturn V and that a manned trip to the Moon would be possible within a year.

That, then, is the story of the Saturn V's unprecedented rise to greatness out of the ashes of failure.
Despite the USA's short and troubled history in space flight and the lengthy record of failure of both
Saturn boosters, NASA somehow conjured up, in little over a year, the biggest, most powerful and
most reliable rocket the world had ever seen - and has not seen since. In short, it was the most
astounding technological feat mankind has ever achieved, a quantum leap in science and
engineering. And for an Apollo project seemingly dead in the water, with less than three years to
meet its deadline, the breakthrough was certainly timely, to put it mildly.

If NASA is to be believed, the new Saturn V underwent further rigorous testing throughout most of
1968 and it was found to be almost entirely trouble-free. It worked perfectly. It was scheduled for
its first manned flight in December of that year, the Apollo 8 mission. There was however one Apollo
mission to complete before then, the October launch of Apollo 7.

On the face of it, Apollo 7 seemed a pretty pointless and redundant exercise. If it were to test the
Saturn V rocket in near Earth orbit, before the more ambitious Apollo 8 mission, then that would
make sense, but it was not. Apollo 7 did not even use the Saturn V, despite its magnificent test
record. Apollo 7 actually sent a three-man crew into orbit on top of a Saturn 1B rocket... It seems
then that, despite the fact that the Saturn 1 had never been more than a stop-gap and the true Apollo
rocket was now ready for manned flights, NASA was still taking the trouble to test it. Why?

I believe the answer is that the Saturn V rocket did not really exist. I believe its apparent existence
was fabricated in 1967 to show the world that the USA had the power to get to the Moon. By this
time however, NASA knew full well it wasn't going to the Moon at all; it was merely going to
pretend. NASA also realized that if the pretense was to be at all credible, it still needed to get a
three-man crew into Earth orbit so that genuine footage of the astronauts in weightless conditions
could be shown on TV. The old Atlas Centaur was under-powered and unreliable and in any case
was too recognizable. The same went for the Titan. NASA still needed a new rocket, even if the Moon
landings were to be faked. And although this rocket didn't have to be hugely powerful compared with
the Saturn V (its actual payload being quite modest), it did have to look and sound the business. The
Saturn 1B was to be the real rocket to send the Apollo astronauts into orbit. Its appearance was to
be modified and it was going to re-emerge as the Saturn V. I believe the purpose of Apollo 7 was to
test this rocket, in its undisguised form.

If you still can't believe the Saturn V never existed, take a look at the history of the USA's space
program since Apollo. Let us suppose for a minute that everything I am saying is wrong and NASA's
version is correct. When the Apollo missions ended in 1972, where did that leave the USA in terms
of space exploration? Pretty much top dog, I would say. Though the Apollo project may have come
to be seen in retrospect as extravagant and overblown, there were nonetheless immense practical
and technological advantages generated along the way. Not least of these was the fabulous Saturn