There is an urban legend saying Kubrick traded the moon landing for technologies needed to shoot Odyssey in Space 2001. True or false for you to decide.At any means until 2026 we won't know for sure as most of it is still classified.
Through the years the Moon's hoax was disputable.There are several mainstream conspiracy theories.For instance the "No stars in the background" which has it's scientific explanation,or "The C stone" another Mother nature irony which we had recently with the " WW2 helmet" discovered on Mars.Even the "Flag in the breeze", it turned out that a wire was holding it steady.
So how,then?maybe this way :o)
60s were tough times for NASA's space program.Specially through the tensest years of the Cold war, culminating in the Cuban missile crisis The Russians had their man in space already,and the NASA program had to catch up.It had to be something remarkable.It had to be the Moon.But how to cope with the radiation and all the other obstacles? Those guys were smart enough.They knew the technologies,they knew what is the bet.In the Hippie times even at the James Bond labs weren't more advanced than this cool ,but vintage Leika
And on top of it they had to shoot a documentary to win the space race and not only.
They had to play it smart and dirty.
Luckily in early 1963 while directing Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick had asked the US Air Force for permission to film one of their B-52 bombers for the movie.Of course he was rejected-he shot a military satire!
Undaunted by the rejection, Kubrick used various special
effects to create the B-52 in flight. When viewing Dr. Strangelove today, these special effects look kinda old
fashioned, but in 1964 they looked very good. It is possible that someone in
NASA saw what Kubrick had done in Dr. Strangelove and, admiring his artfulness, designated Kubrick as
the person best qualified to direct the Apollo Moon landing. If he could do
that well on a limited budget – what could he do on an unlimited budget?A question which had its answer in the Front Screen Projection (FSP) ,cinematic technique with no secrets for the ol' hollywood tricker Kubrik.He realized that the scenes have to look wide-open and expansive, like it was really done on the moon and not in the Universal Studios in London..
But what actually is FSP?
Front Screen Projection - a cinematic device that allows scenes to be projected behind the actors so that it appears, in the camera, as if the actors are moving around on the set provided by the Front Screen Projection.
Or in other words the green screen we may see at 3D shooting.By that years it was motion.Even an earlier version of this technique we can see in the old school 50s-70s movies with the motion background ,where actors are doing everything behind the wheel, but not driving :o)The FSP is more sophisticated though, the state of art technology of it's time.Where's the secret?The magic is in the simlicity.We have a projector,camera,screen,object in the 4 corners and semitransparent mirror in the middle,kinda aluminum folio.Ah yeah and the screen has to be of a glassy material.The logic is to put an actor stand in front of the glassy screen, and he would appear to be “inside” the projection.
But let's see how it looks on the screen with the pre-apes scene from Odyssey in Space 2001.That realistic look that would be needed for the faked Apollo landings.
Remember those scenes from the beginning of the Odyssey? Actually none of them was shot outdoors.it's slides of a desert Spanish landscape being projected onto the glassy screen.To get the perspective correct we have to realize that the screen is right behind the set of rocks (1st example when using contrast) or beyond the thin white line which is there for the example 2 :o)Arranging the stage like a pro and using multiple screens,Kubrick was able to hide the thin horizon between the stage and the wide open space.Yup, Kubrick was good enough to fake the moon..and the open space...
The last patriotic pic really looks funny :o) What the FSP effect shows to our skilled already eye is not only the thin horizon,easy to recognize,but also the texture of the ground.The shades look different,no?
What about the other shades?Or the shadows,the inconsistent shadows? How can the astronauts’ two shadows not be consistent with
each other? If they were actually standing in the bright light of the sun,
their two shadows should be at the same exact angle. Yet they are not. Why?
Because Kubrick used studio lighting! 
But why would Kubrick make a mistake like the inconsistent
shadows in the above image? A great filmmaker like Kubrick must have realized
that this was a huge mistake.Or...he did it on purpose?
Believe it or not,Odyssey in Space 2001 was very expensive endeavor.It took 4 years of production.Kubrick was allowed to make whatever movie he desired using the NASA credits and the USgovernment funding.Knowing that no one would object to his anti-Hollywood methods, he created the first abstract feature film, the first intellectual movie and the greatest esoteric work of art in the 20th century!
As.
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