Sister Luna : Moon Landings Revisisted

A recent report from Russia stated that Yuri Gagarin was NOT, after all, the first man into space. Pravda, on Thursday 12 April 2001 chose Cosmonaut Day in Russia and the anniversary of the Gagarin flight...Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin's famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday.
According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots at the controls were launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959.
"All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published," Rudenko said.
He explained that all these pilots took part in so-called sub- orbital flights, i.e., their goal was not to orbit around the earth, which Gagarin later did, but make a parabola-shaped flight.
"The cosmonauts were to reach space heights in the highest point of such an orbit and then return to the Earth," Rudenko said.

• Now Let us put into perspective the Mammoth task of launching and landing a Man on the Moon, well 3 in this case...The cost of the entire Apollo program: USD $25.4 billion -1969 Dollars ($135-billion in 2005 Dollars). See
  NASA Budget. (Includes Mercury, Gemini, Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbitar, Apollo programs.) Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket cost alone, was about $ 83-billion 2005 Dollars (Apollo spacecraft cost $ 28-billion (CS/M $ 17-billion; LM $ 11-billion), Saturn I, IB, V costs about $ 46-billion 2005 dollars). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Apollo

• Modus Operandi Several reasons have been suggested for the US government to fake the moon landings - some of the recurrent elements are: Distraction - The U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam war. Lunar activities did abruptly stop, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the US ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War. Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it was possible, would have been risky and expensive. It would have been much easier to fake the landing, thereby ensuring success. Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars pretending to go to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. In variations of this theory, the space industry is characterized as a political economy, much like the military industrial complex, creating fertile ground for its own survival. Risk - The available technology at the time was such that there was a good chance that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted. The Soviets, with their own competing moon program and an intense economic and political and military rivalry with the USA, could be expected to have cried foul if the USA tried to fake a Moon landing. Theorist Ralph Rene responds that shortly after the alleged Moon landings, the USA silently started shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of grain as humanitarian aid to the allegedly starving USSR. He views this as evidence of a cover-up, the grain being the price of silence. (The Soviet Union in fact had its own Moon program). Hard To Land on the Moon: Soviets had a five-to-one superiority to the U.S. in manned hours in space. They were first in achieving the following seven important milestones: First man-made satellite in earth orbit… First man in space… First man to orbit the earth… First woman in space… The first crew of three astronauts onboard one spacecraft… The first space walk… The first to have two spacecrafts orbiting simultaneously… This put America at a perceived military disadvantage in missile technology during the very height of the Cold War. Neil Armstrong, the first man to supposedly walk on the moon, recently granted an interview to 60 Minutes. Ed Bradley said, "You sometimes seems uncomfortable with your celebrity, that you’d rather not have all of this attention." Armstong replied, "No, I just don’t deserve it." Collins refuses to be interviewed. The moon is 240,000 miles away. The space shuttle has never gone more than 400 miles from the Earth. Except for Apollo astronauts, no humans even claim to have gone beyond low-earth orbit. When the space shuttle astronauts did get to an altitude of 400 miles, the radiation of the Van Allen belts forced them to a lower altitude. The Van Allen radiation belts exist because the Earth's magnetic field traps the solar wind. The top portion of the lunar module which landed on the moon supposedly popped up off the moon with two astronauts aboard, entered lunar orbit 60 miles up, and docked with the command module in lunar orbit. To look at its design and think such could have actually occurred is absolutely ludicrous. The surface of the moon is a vacuum. The landing module would have been heated to 250 degrees on the light side where they landed. There is no way they could have rejected the heat for as long as 72 hours as they claim on some Apollo missions. Further Links: Moon Movie U.S. government can't find moon landing tape An Investigation Into Apollo Bill Kaysing Astronauts Gone Wild