An Oral History of the US Government’s Attempts to Fake the 1969 Moon Landing

The following are excerpts from an unpublished 1971 Rolling Stone exposé that was scuttled by the Nixon administration, but which has recently been made public through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Lunar Module. An American flag. Lots and lots of gray rocks. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was looking at a photograph of the Moon. But as former NASA head Thomas O. Paine explains, nursing a whiskey soda on his living room sofa, this photograph wasn’t taken on the Moon. It was taken on a soundstage. In Arizona.

THOMAS O. PAINE: I remember getting a phone call from President Nixon in January 1969, a few days after he’d been sworn in, asking for a progress update on the Apollo program. Which, at the time, was going very badly.

WERNHER VON BRAUN: It’s very hard to send a man to the Moon. A lot of people don’t know that.

That’s legendary NASA rocket scientist and reformed Nazi Wernher von Braun. Like Paine, he’s agreed to meet with me to talk about his involvement in what is arguably the most audacious hoodwink in American history.

PAINE: Nixon desperately wanted boots on the Moon by the end of the decade. He said to me, “Remember Jack’s little speech? The one about doing the hard thing? If I don’t put a man on the Moon by December 31st, I’m gonna look like a total jabroni. Do you want me to look like a jabroni? Do you?”

VON BRAUN: President Nixon used the term “jabroni” surprisingly often in private conversation. A lot of people don’t know that.

PAINE: It was during that phone call that Nixon first brought up faking the moon landing.

VON BRAUN: We didn’t like the idea of cheating, but, on the flip side, a lot of our rockets were catching on fire and exploding. So, ultimately, we decided we didn’t have much choice.

As NASA scrambled to get the production underway, they still needed someone to lead the mission.

VON BRAUN: The sound stage, props, and wardrobe all went up in about two weeks.

PAINE: But it was impossible to find someone to direct. We approached everyone we could think of: Altman, Kazan, even Hitchcock. Nobody wanted to touch the project. Too risky.

VON BRAUN: We did eventually get a few young hotshot directors to agree to take a crack at it, but none of them panned out.

PAINE: One of them wanted to make what he called a “gritty, unflinching look at space travel” where the astronauts get into a bloody, zero-gravity fist fight after discovering they’re all dating the same underage girl.

VON BRAUN: As interesting as that would have been, it didn’t really fit the project’s uplifting themes of human progress and American determination.

PAINE: Then there was the guy who pitched a version where the astronauts meet a friendly alien stranded on the Moon who wants to phone home.

VON BRAUN: Needless to say, we passed.

PAINE: I have a feeling Marty and Steven aren’t going to be household names any time soon.

Finally, in April 1969, Paine and von Braun had a breakthrough: a meeting with Stanley Kubrick.

VON BRAUN: Kubrick agreed to do the project on one condition: He wanted to “shoot it practical.”

PAINE: We said, “What do you mean ‘shoot it practical’?” And he goes, “I want to film it on the Moon.”

VON BRAUN: We had to explain to him, “Stan, we can’t get to the Moon. That’s the whole reason we want to shoot it on a sound stage in the desert.” And he said, “Nobody’s going to buy that.”

PAINE: After Kubrick dropped out, the project was officially stuck in development hell.

By May, the entire mission appeared doomed—and the president was furious.

PAINE: Nixon was really on our throats. As he put it, “The Viet Cong are making me look like a total jabroni, and I could really use a win from you people.”

VON BRAUN: But the option on the screenplay had just expired.

PAINE: Which was a shame, because we really liked the line Truman Capote had written for Neil.

VON BRAUN: “Setting foot on the Moon is the condiment that gives space exploration its flavor.”

PAINE: Eventually, we got to thinking, Would it be easier just to send an actual rocket to the Moon?

VON BRAUN: Two months later, the Apollo 11 crew touched down on the lunar surface.

PAINE: You know, it’s funny, when we were first deciding whether to fake the moon landing, we thought to ourselves, How hard could it be? Making a movie isn’t exactly rocket science.

VON BRAUN: But it turns out the only thing more complicated than jet propulsion is navigating Hollywood.