Was the Moon Landing Fake?

The Apollo project was one of humanity’s greatest achievements. For the first time, people walked on another world. Between 1968 and 1972, across nine crewed missions—six of which landed successfully—12 people walked on the Moon, and another 12 went to the Moon but remained in lunar orbit. However, a significant number of people do not believe that the Moon landing really happened. A poll of more than 1,100 Americans taken in 2021 found that 12 percent did not believe that NASA landed on the Moon and another 17 percent were unsure.

Why the conspiracy theory

Why do some people think the Moon landings were fake? Didn’t NASA bring back lots of rocks? Wasn’t it live on global television? The main factor driving Moon-landing denial is distrust of the U.S. government. In 1968, 62 percent of the American people agreed that the government could be trusted to do what was right most of the time. Watergate and the Vietnam War knocked that figure down to 36 percent. Since 2008, trust in Uncle Sam to do what’s right has hovered around 20 percent.

The Cold War

It’s probably unsurprising that for some people “one small step” was just “I am not a crook” in a spacesuit. But now let’s consider the historical context of Apollo. Why did the U.S. go to the Moon? It wasn’t for the rocks. It was to beat the Soviets definitively in the space race. Apollo 11 was a huge propaganda victory for America.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Now imagine if America had faked the Moon landing. The Soviets monitored the American space program. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov later described listening to the Moon landing live. He didn’t watch it with Walter Cronkite on CBS. He was at a Soviet military intelligence facility that was tracking the mission. If the landing had been faked, the Soviets would have figured it out and would have loved to reveal to the world America’s perfidy.

Independent evidence

Apollo 11 and later Moon landings were also independently tracked. The Jodrell Bank radio telescope in the U.K. observed the signal from the lunar module Eagle landing on the Moon and was even able to see when Neil Armstrong took manual control of the spacecraft. The Bochum Radio Observatory in Germany was able to hear the voices of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when the Eagle landed on the Moon, but it could not receive the transmission of their first steps on the lunar surface because the Moon had set by that time. This shows that Armstrong and Aldrin were transmitting from the Moon.

There is also extensive physical evidence that astronauts landed on the Moon. The landing sites have been photographed by probes from the U.S., India, and Japan, and those photographs have shown the tracks the astronauts left on their excursions on the Moon.

The Apollo astronauts returned with 382 kilograms (842 pounds) of lunar rock and soil. Some of these samples were shared with scientists around the world, including the Soviet Union, which had robotic probes return its own samples from the Moon. Had the United States given the Soviets rocks that weren’t really from the Moon, Soviet scientists would have been suspicious.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Apollo 11, 14, and 15 left retroreflectors on the Moon. These are arrays of prisms that reflect a light beam back in the direction it came from. Since 1969, scientists have been aiming laser beams at these retroreflectors to precisely measure the distance from Earth to the Moon. How precisely? The distance is measured to within a few millimeters, enabling strong tests of general relativity.

Was it filmed?

Many theories about the Moon landing being fake have centered on the TV transmission. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, whose 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is set partly on the Moon, is a prominent figure in such theories, with some even claiming that The Shining (1980) is partly Kubrick’s confession of having filmed the fake Moon landing.

Although Kubrick was a technically innovative director, even he could not have gotten around the fact that film and video technology was too primitive in 1969 to fake the Moon landing. It’s claimed that to simulate the low gravity of the Moon, the astronauts were filmed in slow motion, which involves shooting film or video at a higher frame rate than normal. At the time magnetic disk recorders could only store 30 seconds of slow-motion video, a lot less than the 143 minutes Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the surface.

Shooting a fake landing on film would have also been difficult. The cameras on Apollo 11 shot at 10 frames per second. Shooting a typical 35-mm film at 12 frames per second would have required six and a half reels of film for the 143 minutes of footage. Such a film would have to be edited together, and there is no evidence of that (or film artifacts such as scratches) in the Apollo 11 footage.