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Product Name: The Great Moon Landing Hoax

Product Description

The Variable Gravity Training Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas, was built in the late 1950s and played a key role in one of the grandest hoaxes in history: the US-USSR "race to the moon." Discovery of the principles behind gravity control can be traced back to atomic energy research conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission. The findings were secretly reported to then President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. However, nothing was done with it until November of the following year. The Soviet Union's launch of Sputniks 1 and 2 in rapid succession shocked the American public out of complacency and sparked demand for an American space program. Eisenhower, while not enthusiastic about space exploration, knew he had to act soon or suffer in the polls. He met with AEC officials and with Wernher von Braun's contingent of German rocket scientists. The American rocket program, directed by the U.S. Army, had so far yielded dismal results. Rockets could lift small payloads, weighing up to a ton into orbit, but were unreliable and far too risky for human space exploration. Real progress was decades away. When advisors suggested combining the new technique of gravity control with advances in motion picture technology to fake space travel, Eisenhower jumped at it. The "space race" was on.