Conspiracy theories and why the Moon landing really did happen… yet again

Over half a century since we last set foot on the Moon we’re still having to argue the toss over whether we really went there in the first place. David Shapton on why yes, we really did. 

I recently saw the famous clip of the Apollo 17 mission’s Lunar Module taking off from the surface of the moon. It’s one of the most breath-taking visual moments in our recent history, and even more so when you understand the circumstances.

This was something quite remarkable layered on top of all the myriad engineering and intellectual achievements (and opportunities for catastrophe – “single points of failure in NASA parlance”) that added up to the most remarkable mission of exploration that most of us will ever see. I still find it hard to believe that during the 1960s, we both decided to do something previously impossible (an understatement if ever there was one), and (spoiler alert) we did it.

I find it hard to believe, not because I think it was a hoax, but because it was perhaps the biggest overreach ever, and yet, somehow, it all came together.

But, lamentably, I increasingly come across people who don’t believe we ever set foot on the moon.

Moon landings and hoax logic

As conspiracies go, it’s a fairly easy one to get your head around. It has a logical form: “It would have been impossible for us to get to the moon with the level of technology we had in the 1960s, so it must have been a hoax”. That statement seems plausible, and it is certainly valid in its logical form. If something is impossible, then something else must be the case. But the thing is, we now know it wasn’t impossible, so you can’t use that argument.

Lots of other things are impossible, not logically so, perhaps, but statistically and empirically. How, for example, do the 400,000 people who worked on the moonshot (including, peripherally, my dad, who was an aerospace materials engineer) keep a secret watertight for over fifty years? And it wasn’t just any secret. I’d say that is pretty near impossible. It definitely is impossible for us to leave artefacts on the moon without having been there. We can see them through telescopes.

“But we haven’t been there for over fifty years,” say the doubters. As a statement of fact, that’s correct. But drawing a conclusion that we were never there at all is a mistake. There are plenty of reasons why we haven’t been back—some good, some bad, but all of them actual.

Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon. Pic: Neil Armstrong / NASA

I was lucky enough to have watched the moon landing live. I was very young, but I was brought up with spaceflight and engineering and would discuss it around the dinner table. The idea that the moon landing could be a hoax has always been ludicrous to me. If it were a hoax, then why did NASA spend so much building the Saturn 5 rocket, which, you know, we actually saw take off? And if it were a hoax, wouldn’t the risk of something going wrong and exposing the entire farcical proceedings be much too great to contemplate?

The moon landings’ video coverage has always been fertile ground for conspiracies, often from commenters who, despite knowing almost nothing about the mission itself, feel that they alone hold the key to the truth, often jumping on an anomalous shadow in the coverage or pointing out the absence of stars in the footage. Not that anyone except the moon astronauts themselves has been to the moon to experience its unique conditions. Things are unlikely to look or feel the same on the Earth’s satellite. There’s no atmosphere, one-sixth of the gravity, and when it’s hot in sunlight, it can at the same time be freezing in the shadows.

Couple this with a typically comprehensive ignorance of 1960s technology – you can’t expect twenty-year-olds to remember stuff that was fossilized before they were born – and you get a febrile environment for cultivating misinformation.

A pic from the most recent NASA moon mission: Artemis I in orbit

No, no, and thrice no

I mentioned that I’d been watching the ascent of the moon lander module. Andy wrote about the technical aspects of this remarkable video clip. As I’ve come to expect, the comments to the video were festooned with dismissive, indignant and snarky claims of fakehood. But while I was used to those, what surprised me was the sheer depth of ignorance, coupled with the misplaced confidence that is the inevitable outcome of cognitive bias. Here are three comments (in essence) and my rebuttals.

“That thing looks like a really bad fake. It’s covered in foil”.

It’s gold foil, and the purpose is to shield the craft from the excesses of heat differentials that you typically get in space. If it looks fragile or un-aerodynamic, it is. But space and the moon are in a vacuum, so, with no air resistance, there’s nothing to distress the foil.

“They must have left a cameraman on the moon”.

No, it was remote-controlled from our own planet. It was definitely not the most technically demanding part of the mission, except that because of the radio time lag between Earth and the moon, the operator had to initiate the camera move before the spacecraft was visibly moving. In amongst all the opportunities to get that wrong, it all worked on the night, giving us one of the most spectacular sights ever captured on video.

“There’s no way there was enough digital bandwidth for that live video”.

This may well have been true. But it’s irrelevant because it was all analogue.

I guess I’m writing this out of frustration. If you’re going to try to persuade me that there’s a conspiracy, at least do your research. Remember, when you have 400,000 of the cleverest people on Earth working on a moonshot, if you’re going to make it a hoax, you’ll need people even cleverer than all of those.

Tl;dr cheat sheet

• The Apollo 17 mission’s Lunar Module taking off from the moon is a remarkable moment in history; though people persist in stating the moon landing was a hoax citing the technology available at the time 
• There are logical and empirical reasons why the moon landing was not a hoax.
• Ignorance of 1960s technology has fuelled misinformation about the moon landing
• Rebuttals to just some of the conspiracy theories include the genuine purpose of gold foil on the module, the operation of the camera, and the use of analog technology for live video transmission