HOUSTON, TX – For a brief time, astronauts in orbit around Earth were dismissed from their jobs by an overzealous assistant program director.
The assistant director, identified only as Elliott, ran some numbers and decided that NASA needed to make cuts right away. Seeing that the Apollo program was the largest expenditure at the time, he moved to downsize starting at the top, discharging dozens of key personnel including the crew of three astronauts in a command module whizzing around the planet at thousands of miles an hour.
Elliott made it as far as giving a press conference announcing the dismissals before being apprehended and removed from the premises.
Mission Control was able to contact the Apollo craft and notify them of their reinstatement just in time, as they had been making calls to arrange alternative transportation back to the surface.