
Spooky Apollo: Apollo 8 and the CIA - Hooke
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3617/1
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nerdponx
Cool comment at the end:

 _I helped take that Proton photo, or one EXACTLY like it, on KH8 mission 4351
(launched 1981-02-28). I was a NCOIC, Satellite Operations, working on the
GAMBIT program in SAFSP /OD-4 at Sunnyvale at the time. In those days, NPIC
would send us a selection of some of the very best photos taken on each
mission after the film was returned and processed. One of the "beauty shots"
we received after that mission was identical to this one--a Proton booster,
sans payload, being transported by rail at TT. In fact, I think it most likely
that the photo I saw is the very same one pictured here. I remember being very
excited to see it, as I had never seen the first stage of a Proton vehicle
before. And, outside of the intelligence community, no one in the West would
see a complete Proton until December 1984, when the Soviet Vega probes were
launched._

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isostatic
One thing I've found facinating was, after the USSR launched the first
satelite, and put the first man in space, the USA managed to redefine "win" as
being "the moon".

~~~
porpoisely
So goes the world of propaganda. Another interesting spin is how we frame
ourselves as being the anti-imperial liberators of the world and praising
ourselves for workers' rights, anti-child labor and pro-living wage. It was
actually the soviets who were anti-imperial and pro workers rights. It's why
they initially won so many fans in china, india, africa, vietnam, etc. Didn't
someone say history is a lie we tell ourselves over and over again until we
forget it is a lie?

Now in defense of the US, the soviets did put a satellite up first, but we
were more than capable of doing so at the same time or even before. We sent up
a satellite 2 months after the soviets. Contrast that with the moon landing.
The soviets never sent a man to the moon even decades after we did. So in that
light, I think the moon landing was far more impressive and representative of
"victory" for a lack of a better word.

Perhaps we can say the soviets won the first space battle, but we won the
space war? Without a doubt, we won the PR war as the moon landing and
armstrong's "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" will
be the iconic and defining moment of the space race for the rest of history.

~~~
vbtemp
> Another interesting spin is how we frame ourselves as being the anti-
> imperial liberators of the world and praising ourselves for workers' rights,
> anti-child labor and pro-living wage. It was actually the soviets who were
> anti-imperial and pro workers rights.

Isn't there like a subreddit or website called like r/ShitHNSays?

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delinka
I know of a Twitter account[1]

1 - [https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says)

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TangoTrotFox
A phenomenal movie on the Apollo program and our lead up to is "The Right
Stuff" [1]. It's a 1983 film that I only ran into by complete coincidence. It
holds up extremely well and is loaded with fun symbolism, real footage, and
other stuff making it a multi-watcher. It also gets into the CIAs involvement
and the dangerous relationship between visible progress and program/pilot
safety.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28film%29)

~~~
garmaine
The Right Stuff is about Mercury, not Apollo. Great movie though.

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pjmorris
> The best and most comprehensive historical account of the Apollo 8 lunar
> decision is contained in Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox’s 1989 book
> Apollo: the Race to the Moon. Murray and Cox devoted ten pages to the
> subject. They clearly stated that the decision to send Apollo 8 on a
> circumlunar mission was overwhelmingly determined by Apollo’s aggressive
> schedule and not Cold War competition.

1) The book is terrific, well worth the time for anyone interested in these
matters.

2) I didn't see anything in the article that contradicts the idea that the
decision was made based on schedule rather than competition. Did I miss
something?

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Rooster61
> Even if the CIA did provide extensive information to NASA about Soviet
> circumlunar plans, that does not necessarily mean that, as the memo
> indicates, the NASA decision was a “result” of CIA information. Only the
> NASA officials who made the Apollo 8 decision knew what factors influenced
> them most. That was primarily George Low, whose records point to the Apollo
> schedule being the primary influence.

The drive to get Apollo 8 up and around the moon (as well as the intentions of
the rest of the Apollo flights) may not have been explicitly called out in
mission documents as having the purpose of directly competing with Russia, but
I'm not sure that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Even if the
intentions of the program managers and engineers that put Apollo in space
really were just sticking to their planned schedule without concern of the
other side's progress, the funding, fast track bureaucracy, and schedule
timeline that allowed NASA to do the things they did certainly was motivated
by political interests. That, to me, makes the issue of whether or not they
based it on CIA info less profound, if not moot.

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eps
A good read, but the title is a pure click-bait.

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edf13
Yes - no need for "Spooky"

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mordechai9000
I think it's intended as a pun. Spies are sometimes referred to as spooks.

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Latteland
great story, thanks for posting!

