6 compromising facts about NASA that the agency prefers not to talk about
Conspiracy lovers are splashing out with amazing ideas with the stability of a jackhammer. Either they claim that Saddam Hussein planned to take over the world with the support of aliens, or they insist that HIV was created by CIA employees. Especially NASA gets it. The Space Agency has been accused of all sorts of sins, up to the concealment of traces of alien life. Of course, speculation almost always turns out to be fiction, but some compromising information that has become public is true.
The falsification of the moon landing has been talked about since the day when the footage of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 appeared live. A fair portion of firewood was thrown by the space agency itself, when in 2006 it admitted that it could not find the original video recordings of the landing. The search for the missing films continues, but most experts agree that the tapes were rewritten a long time ago in order to save money.
After World War II, the CIA secretly worked on Operation Paperclip, a project to attract military and space technology from Nazi Germany. A document known as the "Ozenberg List" was compiled — a list of prominent scientists and engineers who worked on The Third Reich. The United States has transported more than 1,600 former Nazis, and they have worked on projects such as supersonic missiles, nerve gas and guided missiles.
In 2002, a NASA intern named Ted Roberts decided to impress his girlfriend. They infiltrated the Johnson Space Center and took away more than 270 kilograms of moon rocks. Before selling the loot on the black market (the approximate cost is $ 21 million), the young people scattered stones on the bed and made love. They were soon caught, and Roberts was given eight years in prison.
A few months before the Apollo 11 flight, Neil Armstrong and his crew signed hundreds of postcards and sent them to relatives so that they could sell them in case of a disaster during the flight. And all because NASA refused to issue life insurance policies to astronauts. This practice persists even now. After the Challenger shuttle exploded, the families of the victims received standard federal insurance payments, nothing more.
In the instructions for NASA astronauts, there is a separate paragraph describing what to do if one of the crew members starts to openly freak out, that is, behave inappropriately. In this case, it is necessary to tie the wrists and ankles of the violent with adhesive tape, fix the head and pump the comrade with tranquilizers.
There are quite a lot of women working in the space sector now, but this is a trend of the XXI century. In the 80s, NASA geniuses had a very vague idea about women. When the first American woman, Sally Ride, was supposed to go into space in 1983, the specialists preparing the flight seriously asked her if a hundred tampons would be enough for her for the seven days she would spend in orbit.