Donald asks…
Did Apollo 18 really happen?
The movie is coming out soon and people said that “oh NASA cancelled it.” Blah, Blah, blah. I’m just curious if it was real and something like that actually happened.
Also, is it just me or is everyone also noticing a lot of these 2011 movies that are coming out are like alien-related. Weird.
Joy answers:
The conceit of the APOLLO 18 filmmakers is , of course, that an Apollo 18 mission run by the Department of Defense did happen in December 1973, but was kept secret – and that they have somehow obtained video and documentary proof of it. Given how popular this “found footage” premise has become in Hollywood, and how extraordinarily difficult it would have been to keep such a mission secret – a Saturn V launch was visible from over a hundred miles away, and thousands of personnel, mostly civilians, were required to support it – virtually all knowledgeable people assume all of this is simply a marketing ploy, along the lines of the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.
In fact, only nine Apollo missions went to the Moon, of which only six landed on the surface: Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. Originally, there was a plan for three more lunar missions, but in 1970, NASA was forced to cancel them due to budget cutbacks. These missions had been designated Apollo 15, 19, and 20. After they were cancelled, Apollo 16, 17 and 18 were re-designated as 15, 16 and 17 respectively. In a sense, then, Apollo 18 *did* fly, but designated as Apollo 17, a three day extended lunar mission in December 1972 crewed by Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmidt and Ronald Evans. The true Apollo 18 moon mission, however, was cancelled due to budget cutbacks at least two years or more before it would have flown. Like Apollo 15, 16 and 17, it would have been an extended 3 day lunar mission, tentatively targeted to land at Copernicus Crater. But it was cancelled, and its hardware went unused and later donated to various museums.
As a side note, there were in fact four more manned space flights using Apollo hardware after the cancellation and end of the Apollo lunar program in 1972. There were three missions to the Skylab space station in 1973-74 using Apollo command and service modules, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project of 1975, a joint U.S.-Soviet manned orbital mission. Occasionally you will see reference to Apollo-Soyuz as “Apollo 18,” but this is strictly unofficial.
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