re: What if Apollo 11 wasn't able to come back from the moon?

quote:

---

Damn, it says after the President's address that a priest would say a prayer and then NASA would cut off communication. Am I reading that right? That's cold.

---

Yeah. NASA would have shut the voice radios of the lunar lander off irreparably from Earth with no way for the astronauts to turn them back on from the moon. Everyone involved knew that in the event of catastrophic failure there was no way that allowing panicked voice transmissions of two doomed men to be broadcast for the world to hear was acceptable.

EDIT: Actually I think it was the other way around. At the moment NASA would cut communications, the astronauts would be considered lost, then the priest would begin the burial at sea type thing.