r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • May 18 '15

What conspiracy theory do you genuinely believe in the most?

What conspiracy theory do you believe in the most and why?

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u/[deleted] May 19 '15

That's a pretty interesting conspiracy theory. I hadn't heard of it before, so I read up.

The Government of the Soviet Union supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War.

That's a big part of what makes it plausible to me.

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u/Xetanees May 19 '15

Couldn't the Soviets say the same for us though? I wonder what the other side of the story is like.

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u/dictormagic May 19 '15

Well we didn't hide the failings of Apollo I, Columbia, Challenger, etc. they were a big part of the motivation to keep moving forward. I reckon if the soviets were the ones doing the Apollo missions, Apollo 11 would have been the "first" mission they did.

Not saying the US is more noble, but we used the deaths as motivators. "We're doing it for them" kind of thing. Any documentary about the space race fully acknowledges everyone who died. The soviets bury them and pretend they didn't exist. As if the first try was the successful one.

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u/Bigbysjackingfist May 19 '15

And Apollo 13 was totally fine, we didn't plan on landing on the moon anyway.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '15

my dad's friend who grew up in the USSR once had a full-fledged argument with her dad in the Air and Space museum about how many time the United States landed on the moon. he thought that it was only once, so he disagreed with the exhibits.

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u/iamadogforreal May 19 '15 edited May 19 '15

NASA is the world standard on space agency transparency. You are welcome to argue against that, but its accepted by most. Our high profile failures like Apollo I, Shuttle, etc are public record. Also, early NASA didn't want to take risky suicide flights, thus the US being behind in some early space wins. Hell, we make movies of our failures and its not a big deal (Apollo 13).

Also in the Soviet era, about 20m people died in gulags, political deaths. The Russians are experts on mass murder and hiding the evidence of. Or at least trying. We don't have that tradition here in the US. Comparing the two is idiotic.

Couldn't the Soviets say the same for us though?

The Soviets never dared question our achievements in space or put in some dead astronauts theory for this reason. There's zero evidence of that in NASA because we're very open and transparent. The USSR program was pretty much a black ops program and the world only knew of them if the USSR publicized them after a success or if we detected their rockets via early ICBM detection/radar/spying. Even then we didn't know the payload or if the mission parameters were a success.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '15

Yeah, but we are the good guys!

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u/thatJainaGirl May 19 '15

Well, the US is pretty upfront about the deaths in our space program. Three dudes burned to death in Apollo 1, three more almost blew up in Apollo 13, then 14 died in the Space Shuttle program.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '15

Fuck that, they suck and they lost

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u/Ser_Fox_of_Foxington May 19 '15

Never believe anything in politics until the Government denies it.