Apollo 1

Now, the assignment of a new backup crew would have a large impact on the astronauts who would ultimately fly to the moon on the Apollo missions.

Buzz Aldrin almost certainly would not have been on Apollo 11 if he hadn't flown on Gemini.

So this crash that most people don't remember actually set the stage for the Apollo cruise that we do remember.

But I want to look at this plane crash because while I read this story many years ago, I recently encountered it again.

Some people believe that he wanted to get on the ground before the backup crew so he could show the backup crew who is boss.

Years later, Gene Cernan would say that if it wasn't for the crash, Charles Bassett would have walked on the moon.

And again, we probably wouldn't have seen Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11.

The history that we know in this case was brought to us in part by questionable decision making on the part of one pilot.

And Artemis 2 did not.

But the comparison is a little unfair because in the Apollo program, they did Apollo 7, where they literally, the first time they put humans in the Apollo capsule after the fire of Apollo 1, they only went as far as low Earth orbit.

This was a test of the life support system and so forth.

And they did go all the way to the moon and back.

And Artemis 2 did not.

But the comparison is a little unfair because in the Apollo program, they did Apollo 7, where they literally, the first time they put humans in the Apollo capsule after the fire of Apollo 1, they only went as far as low Earth orbit.

This was a test of the life support system and so forth.

And they did go all the way to the moon and back.

And Artemis 2 did not.

But the comparison is a little unfair because in the Apollo program, they did Apollo 7, where they literally, the first time they put humans in the Apollo capsule after the fire of Apollo 1, they only went as far as low Earth orbit.

This was a test of the life support system and so forth.

And they did go all the way to the moon and back.

How did he do it? Well, Kaysing self-published a book in 1976 called We Never Went to the Moon, America's $30 Billion Swindle.

Released a few years after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, Kaysing's book popularly introduced some of the most well-known talking points of moon landing deniers, such as that the astronauts should have been killed when they passed through the Van Allen radiation belts, noting the lack of stars in photographs, the missing blast crater below the lunar modules, etc.

Beyond these, he also had some more, let's say, unusual and occasionally offensive assertions, which even the most ardent moon landing denier would probably rather distance themselves from.

Not exactly a best seller, Kaysing's book nonetheless laid the groundwork for some of what would come after, with the idea further gaining steam in part thanks to the 1978 film Capricorn One, which shows NASA faking a Mars landing and then going to great lengths to keep it a secret.

Let's see.

Today in 1961, NASA tested the first Saturn rocket in the Saturn Apollo 1 mission.

So there you go.

Happy birthday, Rockets, as we really know them.