Bill Kaysing worked at Rocketdyne for over 7 years (1956-1963) with a secret security clearance ...

Most of what Rocketdyne was doing would have been classified as potential military technology during the Cold War. Kaysing would have needed security clearance just to handle the printed material he was charged with cataloguing. This does not mean he understood those documents, only that he had to be trusted not to hand them over to the Soviets.

The notion that Kaysing's security clearance made him an insider "whistle-blower", as many have characterized him, is ludicrous. Where is his inside knowledge? The guy's almost dead and he hasn't given us any. How are we conclude except that he doesn't really know any inside secrets.

He witnessed the poor management,
inadequate equipment and lackadaisical attitude that characterized the
entire Apollo program.

All from his little office in California. That must have been some trick.

Let me give you a brief summary of my background.

Strangely enough, no one in the industry seems to remember him.

In 1958, top U.S. space scientists ... said, optimistically, that it might be possible to land a man on the Moon by 1980, but that a lot of major problems would have to be solved first.

Well, that was in 1958. After 1961 things changed. And what about those problems? What were they? Were they actually solved? How were they solved? Mr. Wood should be able to describe this in detail since he claims it as his life's work. But instead we just get silence.

According to Bill Kaysing, in 1961 the U.S. Government established the secret $7 billion “Apollo Simulation Project” to hoax the Moon landings.

Utter speculation. Bill Kaysing's ability to spin tales does not impress me.

In Oct. 1963, after consulting with his top rocket scientists (who said it couldn’t be done), Khrushchev stated that Russia had no intention of attempting a manned Moon landing in this century.

Yet we have the records, the eyewitness testimony, and even the prototypes from the Soviets' moon landing program.

General Samuel Phillips, submitted a lengthy report to NASA and to J.L. Atwood, President of North American Aviation in 1966 ... stated that ... they had no confidence in the future performance of the Apollo program.

Factually false. The "programs" referred to in Phillips' report was not the Apollo program as a whole, but rather the CSM and S-II programs that NAA were supplying under contract. It does not, for example, concern the remainder of the Saturn V or the lunar module.

His investigation was conducted as a result of the continual failure to achieve
the progress required to support the Apollo lunar landing.

Mr. Wood seems to want the Phillips report to apply to the entire program, when in fact it was basically just a lengthy complaint about NAA, one of several major contractors. That in itself has to be taken with a grain of salt. NASA was under fire for schedule slippages, and it's natural to shift blame for those onto someone else. In fact NAA had, in addition to its own problems, endured endless design changes and late modifications by NASA, making it almost impossible to satisfy NASA's imposed schedules. Gen. Phillips conveniently brushes those factors under the carpet. In a report designed assign blame to someone else, it's not very smart to acknowledge that some of that blame might be your own fault.

NASA's subsequent performance review concluded on May 18, 1968 states that NASA was impressed with North American's performance. Clearly NAA had cleaned up its act.

The Saturn 5 was supposed to contain over 2 million parts, an impossible
reliability nightmare.

No. Part count is only one measure of reliability. Factors such as linearity and coupling also affect the reliability of a system. In fact, the Saturn V is a much more loosely coupled system than, say, a Boeing 747 which has about six million parts and was also being developed at this time.

Mr. Wood's engineering assessment is pure fantasy.

After that, he was very outspoken in his criticism of the Apollo program. ... The morning of the fire he picked a lemon from the tree in his yard and told his wife, Betty, he was going to put it in the capsule, because it was a lemon too.

No. Grissom tagged the simulator, not the capsule, and this happened quite some time before the flight. Grissom was upset that NAA techs were behind in keeping the simulator up to date with the actual spacecraft. This inaccurate tale is quite common among conspiracy theorists.

The fire was started under Grissom’s seat, in 10 pounds of oily rags that had been placed there, and burned furiously in the pure oxygen in the capsule.

Completely, totally false. No oily rags were in the command module, and the fire started at Grissom's feet in the lower equipment bay where cracked insulation allowed a spark and was fueled by leaking ECS coolant.

After the fire, government agents entered Grissom’s home and confiscated all of his papers.

Grissom had worked almost hand-in-hand with North American engineers designing and building the Block I spacecraft, just as he had been instrumental in designing and building the Gemini spacecraft. Mr. Wood isn't specific about which "government agents" were involved, but everything having to do with spacecraft 012 was impounded precisely so that it couldn't be destroyed or tampered with. If an investigation were to follow, who would you expect would be charged with impounding documents if not "government agents"?

four other Apollo astronauts also died Willliams in a mid-air explosion, two others in a routine airplane landing and Given in a one-car crash.

C.C. Williams indeed died in a T-38 crash on Oct. 5, 1967. Ed Givens indeed died in an auto accident on July 6, 1967. But the other two that Mr. Wood alleges remain a mystery. He seems to refer to the crash which claimed Charlie Bassett and Elliot See, but that occurred on Feb. 28, 1966 -- nearly a year before the Apollo 1 fire.

Surely Mr. Wood's alleged 30 years of research should have picked up this fact.

Was this an attempt to silence uncooperative astronauts?

... or were these simple accidents? Mr. Wood fails to make any sort of case.

Thomas Baron testified before a congressional investigation committee that the Moon mission was crippled by defective
equipment and poor management.

Baron's evidence was shown to be unreliable and inadmissible. His appearance before the committee was a piece of political posturing by anti-NASA senator Walter Mondale.

He died in a mysterious car vs. train
accident four days later.

"Four days later" is extremely misleading. Baron died a week or so after the House committee's report was issued, weeks after he testified, and months after he wrote his report.

No autopsy was performed, although required by Florida state law.

First time I've heard this one; I'll have to check into it. However, what I know about Florida law makes it impossible for the body to have been cremated without a death certificate, which can only be signed by the medical examiner who performed the autopsy in the case of a non-natural death. Sounds a little hard to swallow.

NASA heavily subsidized Stanley Kubrick when he produced the movie, “2001”.

Uh, proof?

... was to show the public what a real lunar landing was supposed to look like.

Then how come it doesn't look anything like a real lunar landing?

Apollo 8 was the first capsule recovered from the lunar vicinity, manned
or not. Its re-entry specific kinetic energy was twice as high as from
Earth orbit.

This is why the unmanned tests of the command module ended by using the SPS to take the spacecraft to a high orbital altitude, and then basically turning around and flooring it to simulate the entry velocity from a translunar return. The notion that only a translunar mission could provide a suitable re-entry test is fairly ignorant.

Supposedly 5,000 changes were made
to the Apollo capsule after the fire in just 21 months.

Nope. About 700.

Early F-1 Saturn 5 first stage rocket motors suffered catastrophic explosions on the test stand. Suddenly the problem, attributed to combustion instability, was solved and no more explosions occurred.

Yes, that's how propulsion problems are often diagnosed and fixed. Catastrophic failures are often due to very simple causes which produce divergent feedbacks. Check again, Mr. Wood, are you sure you're a propulsion engineer?

Launch footage shows an 800’ long, highly
fuel-rich exhaust plume being produced by the 5 “F-1” motors

But Mr. Wood is not an expert in the F-1 design, or in RP-1 fueled motors. Others who are experts don't have a problem with the F-1 plume.

Mysteriously, the F-1 exhaust plumes are dark for the first 8’ after the end of the nozzle, then ignition of a very fuel-rich exhaust plume occurs in the atmosphere.

Mr. Wood's careful, expert examination of the F-1 plume is based solely on the launch stand diagnostic DAC photography operating at about 200 fps, therefore at a very brief exposure. His opinion that it is "fuel rich" is generalized from his supposed experience with hydrogen rockets. He doesn't appear to have much experience with kerosene-burning engines.

Burning kerosene for "show" as Mr. Wood suggests would produce a simple ball of flame, not a linear plume as is observed. In fact, the exhaust gas velocity can be pretty accurately computed from the launch films and is consistent with the specification of the F-1 engine.

Mr. Wood is not saying much that is consistent with someone who claims to be an expert in rocket propulsion.

Were the F-1 engines now on display
produced mainly for public display?

Well, were they? Mr. Wood is adept at raising unsubstantiated questions, but does not take a stab at answering them.

The $6.9 billion LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) Program proposal was only
110 pages.

That's because it was such a new thing that nobody was really sure what it needed to do at first. It was understood that the details would have to be worked out. They hadn't even selected a mission mode, for heaven's sake!

I have found that ten other proposals for programs of this size average over 38,000 pages (with a range of 5,000 to 86,000 pages).

Apples and oranges.

The LEM was poorly designed, with 2
doors instead of one, adding critical weight and reducing interior space
and safety.

False. The LM was brilliantly designed with the forward hatch being optimized for lunar surface egress and ingress, and the upper hatch optimized for docking. In fact the LM is often praised as the most innovative and "pure" vehicle design of the 20th century.

NASA was unable to test the LEM propulsion, landing and staging sequences.

Absolutely false. Numerous unmanned tests validated the propulsion. Apollo 9 was the manned test. Apollo 10 tested both the staging and the backup guidance system.

Armstrong was nearly killed on Earth in the LEM simulator.

Many test pilots are often almost killed testing new designs. That's why test piloting is dangerous and why NASA hired test pilots as astronauts.

The footage showing liftoff from the Moon shows impossible thrust-to-mass ratios

Computations, Mr. Wood? I've done them, and it works out just fine.

... and no luminous exhaust plume.

Since when has Aerozine/N204 propulsion produced a visible flame in a vacuum? Check again, Mr. Wood, are you sure you're a propulsion expert?

In the Apollo photographs there are no stars in the lunar sky.

This from a man who claims to have a baccalaureate and a master degree in engineering, and three other unspecificed degrees in highly technical fields, including physics and chemistry?

No crater was produced by the rocket exhaust under the LEM.

Nor should there have been. Computations, Mr. Wood?

Recent tests with the DC-X rocket, landing tail first on Earth, produced a large, 2’ deep crater and significant damage to the vehicle.

Hm, DC-X at 16,000 kg in earth gravity versus a 7,000 kg lunar module in lunar gravity. Could there possibly be just a tad more thrust involved with the DC-X?

the Moon the crater would have been much larger, due to the Moon having only 1/6 as much gravity as the Earth and no atmosphere.

This is a total non-sequitur. The factors that affect cratering are compaction factor and dynamic fluid pressure. Compaction might be an issue under lunar gravity, but it has been shown that moonquakes have "settled" the regolith. Dynamic fluid pressure is tightly tied to lunar gravity -- less gravity means there's less dynamic fluid pressure from the engine.

a fuzzy enlarged photo of lava flows in Hawaii and Utah used for background.

I can't vouch for Hawaii, but here in Utah our lava flows are very old and have trees growing in them. Most of Utah's geology was formed by wind and water.

Afterward, they were provided with just what they expected: nothing not found on Earth.

Um, geologists can speak at length about what is different about lunar soil.

The U.S. could not afford to conduct a real Apollo program.

Huh? We couldn't afford $30 billion over ten years to land a man on the moon, but we can dole out $70 billion a year for entitlement programs?

If astronauts had been sent to the Moon then, they would have all died from exposure to solar radiation.

Computations, Mr. Wood?

Noam Chomsky, who was characterized by Time Magazine as “arguably the most important intellectual alive” has stated that propaganda is essential in a democracy.

Hm, let's see. The argument is, "Propaganda exists, therefore Apollo was propaganda." A man who holds five degrees and can't reason?

In July 1969, European newspapers questioned the authenticity of the Moon
landing.

Source? May we examine these newspapers? Since they are European, we presume the U.S. government hasn't made them "disappear". This is the kind of argument which must be established by direct proof because counterproof is impossible. We cannot prove that European newspapers did not publish these things, therefore the conclusion cannot be held unless disproven.

Worldwide, more than 70% of the population do not believe the landings happened.

Source?

6/14/70 the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain polled 1,721 U.S. residents in 6 cities and found that more than 30% of Americans did not believe that the Moon landings were authentic.

But we were just told that no U.S. newspapers covered the alleged American skepticism. So if Knight-Ridder conducted this poll, it must have never published the results. So how did Mr. Wood find out about it?

David Wise in “The Politics of Lying” said in 1973: “A substantial number of Americans do not believe that their
government landed men on the Moon.”

But what's the context of this statement? Did Mr. Wise conduct any sort of scientific inquiry to quantify his statement?

Today, top NASA official admit that
“many millions” of people still don’t believe it happened.

That is a statement of fact, not an admission of guilt. NASA may be speaking about the worldwide conspiracy movement, but even if we limit it to the United States, "many millions" can still be a very small percentage.

recent polls show that less than 50% of the U.S. population now believe that it happened.

Which polls?

First, this entire section smacks of argumentum at populum. Apollo is either authentic or not, regardless of the majority of belief. Further, the vast amount of unsubstantiated claims here is highly suspicious. Mr. Wood has made claims which can be documented and ought to be documented, but which have no documentation.

Was it [Von Braun's] his job to come up with a design for a Moon rocket that would withstand careful technical scrutiny?

Forever? Why is it that people who say the Saturn V doesn't work won't give us any specifics?

Did he resign from the Apollo Program in 1970 out of disappointment that we weren’t really going?

Where did this come from? Yet another question with no answer from Mr. Wood.

As in the 1974 movie Capricorn I ...

A whole lotta speculation.

Larger amounts of phony Moon rocks
were manufactured on Earth and sent to laboratories for analysis

... which would have immediately revealed them to be forged. Manufatured how?

The rest of the article is mostly an apples-and-oranges comparison of other technology that ignores political and fiscal concerns.

Interesting. Someone with five (count 'em, five) degrees in highly technical fields, and a resume that includes everything that flies, makes numerous scientific blunders and then bases the majority of his case around political issues and comparisons to unequivalent programs. Wouldn't someone with Mr. Wood's qualifications want to spend more time doing a technical analysis of Apollo hardware, procedures, and claims?