posted 06-05-2009 12:01 PM            

Then there is the cost. The effort and expense required to keep up the pretence of a fake Apollo mission over 40 years would far exceed the trouble of simply landing a man on the Moon. If the conspiracy theorists are right, there would be a secret clause in every annual US budget authorising hush money for retired Nasa engineers. Aaronovitch demolishes his chosen conspiracies twice over. First, he makes it clear how inconceivable they are compared to the relative likelihood of the official version of events being true. Second, he takes them on their own terms, examining the so-called evidence in web pages, pamphlets and pseudo-science articles and refuting it with better sourced, more reliable evidence. He salvages facts from the wreckage of history submerged in oceans of amateur, bogus revisionism.