(June 17, 2014 at 7:03 am)Stimbo Wrote: Indeed. There's a reason the first actual landing mission was Apollo 11, not Apollo 1.
The US did not in fact cover up any significant failures during Apollo. They were headline news. Two notable failures were the inboard fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1, and the wrongly specified switch that blew up Apollo 13's service module. It may not have trumpeted all nonglamorous technical problems on the front page, like pogo oscillation, premature engine shutdowns, electrical failures, etc, but they were not hidden and easy for anyone who cares for facts rather than merely hearing their own opinions to find.
In fact, saturn and Apollo owe their good success rate to the most lavish funding(compared to objective and real technical challenge), and most thorough and comprehensive testimg of any space flight system ever devised. Soviets tried to do the something 90% as technically ambitious overall (more ambitious in some areas) on 1/4 the budget in 1/2 the time. As a result, they had 4 launch failures out of 4 tries. Each of them failed for a specific reasons which NASA had addressed because they were uncovered during NASA's much more extensive tests.
The soviets did in fact cover up all 4 launch failures, terminated the program before a fifth launch attempt could be made, thoroughly destroyed all remaining rockets on assembly line, and never acknowledged the program existed until the fall of Soviet Union.