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Spooky Apollo: Apollo 8 and the CIA
- Latteland 8y agogreat story, thanks for posting!
- eps 8y agoA good read, but the title is a pure click-bait.
- edf13 8y agoYes - no need for "Spooky"
- mordechai9000 8y agoI think it's intended as a pun. Spies are sometimes referred to as spooks.
- pjmorris 8y ago> The best and most comprehensive historical account of the Apollo 8 lunar decision is contained in Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox’s 1989 book Apollo: the Race to the Moon. Murray and Cox devoted ten pages to the subject. They clearly stated that the decision to send Apollo 8 on a circumlunar mission was overwhelmingly determined by Apollo’s aggressive schedule and not Cold War competition. 1) The book is terrific, well worth the time for anyone interested in these matters. 2) I didn't see anything in the article that contradicts the idea that the decision was made based on schedule rather than competition. Did I miss something?
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoA phenomenal movie on the Apollo program and our lead up to is "The Right Stuff" [1]. It's a 1983 film that I only ran into by complete coincidence. It holds up extremely well and is loaded with fun symbolism, real footage, and other stuff making it a multi-watcher. It also gets into the CIAs involvement and the dangerous relationship between visible progress and program/pilot safety. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28film%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28film%29
- garmaine 8y agoThe Right Stuff is about Mercury, not Apollo. Great movie though.
- isostatic 8y agoOne thing I've found facinating was, after the USSR launched the first satelite, and put the first man in space, the USA managed to redefine "win" as being "the moon".
- simonh 8y agoI think if the Russians had put a man on Mars in the 70s and America hadn't, we would have a different definition of Winning. In most wars for example who ever wins the first battle is important, but it's who wins the last battle that really matters.
- nerdponx 8y agoCool comment at the end: I helped take that Proton photo, or one EXACTLY like it, on KH8 mission 4351 (launched 1981-02-28). I was a NCOIC, Satellite Operations, working on the GAMBIT program in SAFSP/OD-4 at Sunnyvale at the time. In those days, NPIC would send us a selection of some of the very best photos taken on each mission after the film was returned and processed. One of the "beauty shots" we received after that mission was identical to this one--a Proton booster, sans payload, being transported by rail at TT. In fact, I think it most likely that the photo I saw is the very same one pictured here. I remember being very excited to see it, as I had never seen the first stage of a Proton vehicle before. And, outside of the intelligence community, no one in the West would see a complete Proton until December 1984, when the Soviet Vega probes were launched.
- Rooster61 8y ago> Even if the CIA did provide extensive information to NASA about Soviet circumlunar plans, that does not necessarily mean that, as the memo indicates, the NASA decision was a “result” of CIA information. Only the NASA officials who made the Apollo 8 decision knew what factors influenced them most. That was primarily George Low, whose records point to the Apollo schedule being the primary influence. The drive to get Apollo 8 up and around the moon (as well as the intentions of the rest of the Apollo flights) may not have been explicitly called out in mission documents as having the purpose of directly competing with Russia, but I'm not sure that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Even if the intentions of the program managers and engineers that put Apollo in space really were just sticking to their planned schedule without concern of the other side's progress, the funding, fast track bureaucracy, and schedule timeline that allowed NASA to do the things they did certainly was motivated by political interests. That, to me, makes the issue of whether or not they based it on CIA info less profound, if not moot.