a report about You Only Live Twice done by me

I watched the sixth James Bond film a while ago but didn’t write about it until now. It is called “You Only Live Twice” or #YOLT. Although the film was written by Roald Dahl it was not illustrated by Quentin Blake. James Bond dies at the start by a shooting and then he is brought back to life by a funeral and a submarine. Next he investigates everyone’s human spaceflight program. This part got very confusing for me.

The film takes place in 1967, after Project Gemini but before Apollo. NASA is using a two person spacecraft that is clearly the Gemini capsule, but they refer to the mission as Jupiter 16. The Jupiter rocket missions I know about were all unmanned and suborbital, although some had rhesus or squirrel monkeys. That was weird, but not the weirdest. NASA is shown launching another “Jupiter” mission using a Gemini capsule but they clearly use an Atlas D lower stage with an Agena upper stage instead of a Titan II GLV. The Atlas-Agena combination was never rated for manned flight so it would be pretty weird to use it on these obviously super secret missions named Jupiter.

This made me think maybe all the space scenes were faked in a studio. Also, the mission controller whose handles the ground side of capsule communications refers to himself as “CAPECOM” instead of “CAPCOM”. Serious alarm bells were going off in my head at this point.

The soviet space team is either super pro at copying or bought gear on the black market. They launch their two person spacecraft using a Titan II GLV. Yea right! And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Meanwhile, James Bond infiltrates the bad guy lair and finally meets Number One, chief of the Number Friends and leader of SPECTRE. His name is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Probably a made up name, I’d say, because it looks like he left out some letters. He has been using his own secret rockets that get launched from inside a volcano in Japan to tease the USA and the USSR.

the SPECTRE capsule is swallowing a Soviet capsule

The rocket used by SPECTRE is super advanced and has lots of shiny. The rocket looks like it is made by the same team of engineers that built Thunderbird 1. It is a single-stage-to-orbit reusable rocket that looks a lot like a chromed up Agena second stage with a nose shroud modified to open and close on command. It can also do vertical precision landings. Very cool. Elon Musk is still figuring that one out.

The launch procedures used by SPECTRE are super agile. They don’t send the astronauts to the pad until 90 minutes before launch and also send an extra one in case one is James Bond. This proves useful, but not useful enough. James Bond wins anyway. #YOLT. Except if you are a Number Friend. Then its is #YOLO and so Number Four dies and also the new replacement Number Three and Number Eleven dies. But Number One gets away as usual.

I think some of the stuff in space was faked.