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

I'm not 100%sure any of that ever happened.

quote:

---

I hate space. I wis we would leave it alone. 

---

What!?!? Space is awesome.

Would have been an awkward flight back for Michael Collins too. Wonder what the public would have made of the guy who came back

BTW, at the WW2 Museum in New Orleans, there's a similar contingency letter on display. It was written by Ike, and in it, he accepts full responsibility in the event the D-Day landings were a failure.

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.

The sheer amount of these speeches I would have given while playing Kerbal Space Program is ludicrous. So many lost Kerbonauts.

This scenario was very unlikely- they could have easily died in an accident, but simply being stuck on the moon was a low likelihood. The LLM had a binary fuel with a manual valve, making a dud impossible.