Could Nasa Launch A Secret Moon Mission

By Natalie WolchoverThe new film "Apollo 18" is like "The Blair Witch Project" of space travel flicks, couched as found footage shot by NASA astronauts during a secret mission to the moon in 1973. In the story, the astronauts encounter unfriendly lunar aliens, chaos ensues and NASA forever hushes the whole thing up.It's science fiction, of course: History has it that Apollo 18, along with 19 and 20, was canceled - Apollo 17 was NASA's final lunar mission. But the new film will surely stoke conspiratorial fires about the agency's secret activities. Might NASA really have launched a secret human spaceflight during the Apollo era, without anyone noticing it?Almost definitely not. TOO MANY EYES AND EARS"Developing the entire manned program involved 400,000 people, so to cover up the whole thing you'd have to keep them all quiet," Craig Nelson, a space historian and author of "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon" (Viking 2009), told Life's Little Mysteries. "Just to send astronauts up in the air required a crew of 300 people. Not only did you have all of them working as part of NASA, but a huge percentage worked for other contractors, so you'd have to have hundreds of people keeping a secret forever."...Read more @ LIVE SCIENCE WATCHER REPORT UPDATES"FIGHT THE FUTURE! JOIN THE RESISTANCE @ FACEBOOK/WATCHERREPORT!"