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There’s old rumors they did a manned landing first, but kept it under wraps until a successful return, which didn’t happen.

That would have leaked out if it had been true. I mean truly leaked out, not a bunch of Art Bell stuff. They never had a functioning spacecraft/rocket system that could get them there and back.

I think it goes back to the Russians putting a lander on the moon - they soft-landed a probe with Luna 8 or 9 back in '66, but they had a probe (Luna 15) that was going to return a sample. That probe landed on the Moon when Armstrong and Aldrin were still there. And by "landed", I mean hit a mountainside at several hundred miles an hour. I think that gave rise to a lot of conspiracy theories.

I forgot about the Zonds - those could have easily formed the basis of the rumors as well, but those things were so dangerous, they were never going to use them, at least not before we got there. Heck, one of the Zonds even killed multiple people on the ground.

The Soviets, for various reasons, could not think and engineer like we could - when you look back 50 years, everything looks like it went smoothly, but the reality is that our engineers were constantly adjusting and redesigning things all the way up until '69. Apollo 1, while a tragedy, actually gave us the time and focus needed to get a lot of things right - I'm very convinced that if there had been no fire, and things continued at the same pace, that something bad would have happened later on.

And we had a lot of young engineers in the Apollo program - the average age was in the 20s. One of my few regrets - I graduated in the midst of the landings, and even had a waiver from the AF to join NASA, and pay back my scholarship (Vietnam was winding down as well), but I was tipped off by a friend working at NASA that there were going to be layoffs, and that I should follow the path I started. Still regret not joining NASA later on.