<font color="ff0000">B.A.:</font>Being behind schedule at some point does not mean they couldn't make the 1969 deadline

One has to understand the complex relationship between the Block I and Block II spacecraft and where each was in its development in order to understand why the Apollo 1 failure had a limited effect on the program.

About 700 ECOs (Engineering Change Orders) were applied to the Block II spacecraft pursuant to recommendations following the Apollo 1 fire. Is that a large number? Non-engineers wouldn't know for sure.

In fact an Apollo command module contains about 1 million parts, comparable to a Boeing 757 airliner. It would not be uncommon on a project of that size at that time to have thousands of ECOs during development, and a hundred or so per year during producting and deployment.

So if we wish to answer the question, "How much did the Apollo 1 fire affect the design of the Block II spacecraft?" the answer would be, "Not all that much," compared to how much such a design changes normally during development, without the changes suggested by catastrophic failure.

In short, the Block I simply wasn't all that essential to the Apollo program, and therefore its failure didn't set back the development.

So what evidence leads you to suspect the early missions were faked?

It's very important to clearly understand this question.

First, we must have epistemological falsifiability. That is, the evidence which is given in favor of a hypothetical staged landing must be explainable only by such a hypothesis, and not also by any other.

Second, if one claims, for example, that all landings prior to Apollo 14 were staged, but all landings from Apollo 14 on were authentic, then the evidence one gives in favor of fraud must be there for the faked missions but not there for the authentic ones. You can't point to the same "anomaly" and say that one explanation applies in the fake missions and another one applies in the authentic ones.

I happen to know something about epistemology, so this could be fun.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JayUtah on 2002-02-14 19:06 ]</font>