Capricorn One: Encyclopedia II - Capricorn One - The plot

Capricorn One - The plot

The setting is the present (actually the late 1970s) with one exception: the first manned mission to Mars is on the pad, ready to go. When NASA realizes that a major subcontractor's faulty life support system design has doomed any chance of a successful flight, they decide to fake the landing rather than scrub the mission.

Just as the space ship is about to leave Earth, the bewildered crew are removed from the ship and flown to an old U.S. Army base deep in the Sonoran Desert. They are then informed that whether they like it or not, they will fake the TV footage from Mars. Initially they refuse, but the authorities imply that their familes will be murdered if they do not co-operate.

As the ship continues to Mars with no one aboard, the astronauts remain in captivity for a period of several months and are filmed "landing on Mars."

Despite almost no one in NASA knowing the truth, an alert technician notes something absurdly impossible - the television transmissions are arriving ahead of the spacecraft telemetry - "It's almost as if they were closer... but those signals couldn't be coming from three hundred miles" he tells a journalist. The technician then mysteriously disappears and the journalist grows suspicious, and every clue he uncovers results in an attempt on his life.

When the astronauts are supposedly about to splashdown on Earth, everything goes wrong. The empty but real space capsule burns up on re-entry, leaving the world mourning three dead heroes. If the live astronauts were to then show up, the conspiracy would be exposed, so the remainder of the film is a life and death hunt as the astronauts attempt to evade NASA/military types who pursue them to ensure that they remain dead heroes.

The movie significantly increased interest in Apollo moon landing hoax accusations, and can also be said to be a direct inspiration for the television programme Space Cadets.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The plot", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki