1969 is the year of the first moon landing, i.e day of the moon.

I think it is as you say to do with the first moon landing. I believe there is something ot do with the silence or silents however you say it. this should a very exciting and interesting episode

That spacesuit doesn’t look to be in particularly good nick…

Yep, I reckon it’ll be the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories about the moon landing.

Moon landing conspiracies seem to be popular this year (what with the new Transformers movie and that other one about “Apollo 18″). But I’ll stick with the Doctor’s explanation for this one.

And he (she?) seems to be standing in some sort of building, so maybe they got lost and ended up in Utah instead of the moon. heheh

Like I said on the comments when Whoviannet revealed the titles it looks like the scary ones

The way the darkness is with the heavily blacked out visor makes me think Vashta Nerada

As both a rabid Doctor Who fan and a rabid NASA geek, I think I may actually explode when this episode airs.

As well as we can tell given the (probably deliberately) poor lighting, the suit appears to be a decent reproduction of an Apollo Extravehicular Mobility Unit, complete with PLSS backpack, and right down to the reinforced fingertips on the gloves. This is a bit of a plausibility problem, as they appear to be on Earth, and on Earth it should weigh about 200 pounds. The suit also doesn’t look pressurized, but pressurizing it would probably be too much commitment to realism for too little benefit. The visor appears blacked out, but this may simply be an effect of the lighting; the gold-tinted sun visor appears nearly black when not in direct light. Of course, the opaque visor makes it very easy to conceal the identity of whoever is inside the suit — it could be anybody in there!

The suit is all white; in 1969, all EMUs were white. Starting with the ill-fated Apollo 13, red stripes were added to the arms, legs, and helmet of the commander’s suit to make it easier to visually distinguish the two crew on video and in photographs. But nobody had thought of that yet at the time of this episode, which is rumored to be 1969.

In 1969, as we all know, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. That was in July. There were two other Apollo flights prior to that — Apollo 9 launched March 3 on an Earth-orbit mission to test the LM in Earth orbit, and Apollo 10 launched on May 18 as the “dress rehearsal” for the moon landing. One could insert a hypothetical mission into that cycle somewhere, or perhaps make a case that one of those actual missions was actually a failed moon landing. If so, look for credits for these real-world Apollo astronauts:

James McDivitt, David Scott, Russell L. “Rusty” Schweickart, Thomas P. Stafford, John W. Young, Eugene Cernan

There were also two missions which landed on the Moon in 1969: Apollo 11 in July, and Apollo 12 in November. Here are their crew:
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Charles “Pete” Conrad, Richard Gordon, Alan Bean

Apollo 12 was kind of interesting; they made a precision landing next to the robotic probe Surveyor 3, which they inspected and then partially dismantled so bits could be returned to Earth for further study. (Its camera is in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum.)

It’s also possible that this relates to Apollo *training* and not an actual mission. Considerable training was done in the American southwest, which could fit in nicely with the location shooting done in Monument Valley. Perhaps some alien force invades astronauts conducting mission training in Utah? Who knows, and he’s not telling!

i agree with thisisausern because as well as the suit it controls the shadows.

I lightened this picture by a lot, and it looks like, by the shape and design of the face, that the occupant of the suit is a female.. which doesn’t quite run true because there wasn’t any female astronauts until quite a bit later.
Maybe it’s a parellel universe??