on July 20, Hollywood is hoping that a new movie about NASA staging a fake version of the moon landing will take off at the box office.launching in theaters July 12, a Nixon White House aide sends NYC ad executive Kelly Jones to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to oversee a fake version of the first moonwalk on a sound stage in case the real version doesn’t pan out. The idea is that the U.S.—then in the middle of thewith the Soviet Union—can’t afford to fail.
“Among the NASA employees that I talked with about the script, this was the thing that caused the most laughs,” says Barry. “In dealing with the public in any form, I was regularly reminded by our legal folks that giving even the appearance of an endorsement for a commercial product would get me in big trouble.”
With that said, despite all of the physical rock samples brought from the moon and analyzed by a consortium of highly-respected scientists, a small minority of Americans still think that there was no way NASA had the budget or the time to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.