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How did Dr. Evil have his moon base laser constructed—and in 1969 no less—without any nation knowing about it even a teensy wheensy little bit. One would at least expect spies from various nations to at least suspect something is going on somewhere by someone, especially considering the sheer amount of fuel, construction, and material that would need to be procured and processed.

Is there any (possible) canonical explanation for this, or are we really to just be forced to do the easy route and chalk it up to the fact that it's a comedy movie?

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    Hey! Welcome to M&TV. I'm going to remove the parody tag. This question may be about a film that happens to be a parody (sort of) but it's not about parody itself.
    – Catija
    Sep 25, 2015 at 20:23
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    I kinda feel like the realism and austin-powers tags should never ever go together... kudos for acknowledging that in the question though Sep 25, 2015 at 20:40
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    Possible canonical explanation: Time Travel.
    – cde
    Sep 25, 2015 at 21:29
  • @cde: Lol, perfect. Sep 28, 2015 at 21:53

1 Answer 1

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In the 1960s, it wasn't always possible to detect rockets going off, there was a system of satellites in the that decade but it was geared towards detecting Soviet nukes in the boost phase and thus focused entirely on the northern hemisphere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Missile_Early_Warning_System

Though I hesitate to spend too much effort (it's far from a serious movie), Dr. Evil would have had to have lifted all the materials into orbit from South America or possibly Australia. There aren't very many nations that would be friendly to an international terrorist threatening western governments in either of those places. So he may have novel spaceflight technology not reliant on rocket technology (anti-grav, etc).

You are correct to assume that whatever the specific details, he would be moving many thousands of tons of equipment and many hundreds of people through this clandestine spaceport to be able to build a moon base. To construct it he would have needed to put dozens of people on the moon (and if memory serves, the only nation to do so managed to send exactly 1 dozen people to the moon... dozens is inconceivable).

It would have had a multi-trillion dollar price tag (inflation-adjusted), required a small city of workers, and been the most impressive engineering feat ever accomplished by mankind.

Conclusion: mildly implausible.

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    Especially since all he wanted was a million dollars... Sep 25, 2015 at 21:28
  • @John_O: Excellent answer! :D Sep 28, 2015 at 21:56
  • @WayneWerner: LOL!!! Sep 28, 2015 at 21:56

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