Could a reallife scenario mimic the new film Apollo 18, shot as found footage shot by NASA astronauts during a secret mission to the moon in 1973? In the story, the astronauts encounter unfriendly lunar aliens, chaos ensues and NASA forever hushes the whole thing up. Could NASA or China's Space Agency, actually launched a secret human spaceflight, without anyone noticing ? According to the experts at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Center (NRC), and elsewhere, definitely not. "Developing the entire manned program involved 400,000 people, so to cover up the whole thing you'd have to keep them all quiet," Craig Nelson told Fox News, a space historian and author of Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon. "Just to send astronauts up in the air required a crew of 300 people. Not only did you have all of them working as part of NASA, but a huge percentage worked for other contractors, so you'd have to have hundreds of people keeping a secret forever." According to archival records, the number of NASA employees had, in fact, dropped to around 200,000 by 1973, the year Apollo 18 was originally scheduled to take off. That's half the peak employment of 1965, but still a huge number of people to keep a secret that huge under wraps, had NASA carried out a lunar mission in secret. Nelson also told Fox News that the space agency would have somehow had to quiet the millions of people who saw each liftoff of the Saturn 5 rocket (which delivered Apollo's lunar capsules into space) as it left the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "There's no way [NASA] could cover up a launch. They could claim that the Air Force was doing it, but even then they would have to completely disguise an Apollo mission as an Air Force satellite mission, and that would be extremely difficult," Nelson told Life's Little Mysteries. But could China be a different story?...
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