Welbourne: “Many people have also wondered why NASA should apparently have been so stingy on its photographic budget. Particularly when you consider how important the pictures are supposed to be.”
Benson: “Why should people wonder in that way?”
Welbourne: “We’re told that they spent all that money putting that probe on Mars and then what do they do? They equip it, if you please, with a camera which can focus only up to one hundred meters. And that, as somebody observed, is about the size of a large film studio. It doesn’t start to add up. If they’d really wanted good pictures of Mars they would have fitted a vastly superior camera system Better cameras are available - make no mistake about that - but the one they used ... well, it was almost as if they’d deliberately fitted blinkers to the whole mission.”
Benson: “You mean they were determined that we should see only what they wanted us to see?”
Welbourne: “That could well be. You’ve got to remember that all these pictures we get come in through NASA - they’re simply passed on to the rest of us. So if they tell us it’s Mars ... well, we have to believe them. It’s exactly the same soundwise, of course. I mean, we don’t hear everything that’s said between Mission Control and the spacecraft. There’s a second channel. They call it the biological channel ... ”
Benson: “We did learn a little about that from Otto Binder.”
Welbourne: “Sure, Binder ... I remember he did blow the gaff on that after Apollo 13 ... well, this biological channel is officially just for reporting on medical details. In fact, though, they switch to it whenever they have something to say they don’t want the whole world listening in on ...”
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