Nicki Minaj’s moon landing conspiracy gets destroyed by ex-NASA senator: ‘Study some history’

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) spent over 54 days in space during his career as a NASA astronaut. Having spent nearly two months orbiting Earth, he had some pointed thoughts about rap star Nicki Minaj’s lunar landing conspiracy theory.

Minaj, who has recently cozied up to President Donald Trump, cast doubt on the historic 1969 Apollo 11 landing this week during an appearance on Katie Miller’s podcast.

“I don’t think we landed on the moon,” Minaj said on Wednesday’s “Katie Miller Pod.”

“I asked Elon (Musk) this one. He said we did indeed land on the moon,” said Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller.

Minaj responded with a shrug, and Miller moved onto another topic.

On Thursday, MeidasTouch News reporter Pablo Manríquez caught up with Kelly to get his thoughts on the matter. He first responded with a hearty laugh.

“You know, there’s like a whole crazy community of people out there that believe in these nutty conspiracy theories,” Kelly told Manríquez. “What I often tell people is that, in the 1960s when we were in a competition with the Soviets to land on the moon, you know what they said after Apollo 11? They said ‘congratulations.’ ”

In the days leading up to the landing, Russian physicist Leonid Sedov wrote about the magnitude of the moment. “Mankind highly appreciates the achievement of the American specialists and the daring astronauts,” Sedov wrote in Russian newspaper Pravda.

After the Apollo 11 mission achieved the first successful human landing on the moon in July 1969, at the height of the Cold War, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Nikolay V. Podgorny sent a formal telegram to U.S. President Richard Nixon conveying his “congratulations and best wishes to the space pilots.”

Also soon after the landing, Russian cosmonauts sent a message to the Apollo 11 crew: “We … closely followed your flight. We wholeheartedly congratulate you on the completion of your wonderful journey to the moon and safe return to earth.”

Nearly six decades later, conspiracy theorists like Minaj still believe the initial moon landing and the five other successful Apollo missions that followed were all a hoax.

But, as the United Kingdom-based National Institute of Physics explained, “every single argument claiming that NASA faked the Moon landings has been discredited.”

“They tracked us to the surface of the moon and they congratulated us,” Kelly said of the Soviets. “So I would suggest that she lay off the conspiracy theories and study some history.”

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