This answers the conundrum "How do you get thousands of people to stay quiet about a deception?"
1. Compartmentalization. The janitor doesn't know the big picture what the Directors of NASA know. Heck, most of the software developers don't even know.
2. Those with strong morals/backbone, love of the truth etc. end up "ѕυιcιdєd", committing ѕυιcιdє with 3 shots to the back of the head (get it?)
Exactly. I worked at NASA for 5 years as a software engineer, and I can attest to the extreme compartmetalization taking place there. You'd have half a dozen individuals dedicated to a piece of something that was no bigger than a large microwave oven. We barely knew anything about what it was hooked up to, much less the larger picture of what was going on. I would bet, based on how things are organized, that the total number of individuals who had knowledge of the big picture were no more than one or two dozen. And those dozen are controlled, by bribery, by blackmail, by threatening them and their families, and then if they still end up trying to stray off the reservation, they can be taken out quite easily. They murdered Guss Grissom and his entire crew, as Grissom was blowing the whistle on the fact that NASA had zero chance of making it to the moon. They realized that he was not about the play along with the faked moon landing, so they had to find those who would.
I wrote software for one small part of this thing ... and there were about a dozen others writing software for other parts of it. And there were a half dozen hardware technicians working on the mechanical aspects of it. Overall, I'd say that there were nearly 20 individuals dedicated full time for about 4-5 years to it. It's really a piece of junk, if you think about it for a minute, and any private sector engineering company could do 10x better. And that reminds me of the cardboard "lunar lander" with duct tape and loose cardboard on it.
