Imagine Apollo 11

Talking about movie sets (see the post below).

There is a conspiracy theory which states that there was no Apollo 11 landing on the moon. It was, the theory claims, staged by Stanley Kubrick, appropriately the guy who shut the "Space Odyssey".

A friend of mine got me thinking. If there was no landing, then how come Soviets never said anything? The telescopes were good enough to confirm or deny the landing. The Soviets sure as hell must have monitored the entire event. And there is no chance on earth they would have let the "capitalist empire" to get away with winning the space race without actually winning it.

Sure enough, Soviets reported the landing. Not even a peeps came from the TV when it was airing photos of American astronauts making their big step for humanity. Not a peeps. Uncle Sam won. We give up.

Not so fast. Turns out, there is a theory Gagarin never went to space too. He was chosen for his smile over the first pilot, Titov (indeed, you don't have to be a pilot to be an actor), got a movie star shot next to rocket, smiled, said "poehali !", and the rocket was lunched. By that time, soviets have already lost dozens of dogs and several pilots trying to beat the Americans. They needed a victory. They could get pictures of taking off rocket easy enough, it just kept falling back after a while. Can be a problem, if you need to show pilot smile after successful landing. So, Gagarin never stepped inside.

Now imagine that Americans found out about this. Imagine, they decided to get even. Imagine, they came to Soviets and said. "Look. You got your movie. Fine. Now let us do ours. Or else."

Just imagine.