MOSCOW, November 5. /TASS/. The US astronauts' mission to the Moon certainly took place, but the video footage shown to the global audience might have been filmed beforehand, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev told an audience at the educational marathon "Knowledge. The First."
Prokopyev acknowledged that some skeptics questioned the authenticity of the US mission to the Moon, but emphasized that his senior colleagues in the Russian space industry confirm its occurrence.
"Some say: 'They probably filmed it in a pavilion.' This is a possibility, perhaps, because in the US there is a firm rule: you have to report to the taxpayers somehow. How does one do this? In those days, there were no GoPro cameras. It was hard enough to make a full-length movie like the one they ended up with. Most likely, it was shot in a pavilion so that people would think the scenes were really taking place on the Moon," Prokopyev explained.
He also pointed out that the fact that US astronauts did indeed land on the Moon "is confirmed by automatic probes and cannot be subjected to doubt."
Earlier in July, Roscosmos CEO Yury Borisov confirmed that the soil samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s were genuine. He recalled that NASA had shared these samples with Soviet colleagues, and according to the Russian Academy of Sciences, they were "authentically lunar."
Lunar conspiracy
The first humans to set foot on the Moon were US astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. Their Eagle landing module touched the lunar surface in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969.
Following this, five other successful manned missions landed on the Moon, with the last one—by the crew of Apollo-17—in 1972. A total of 12 US astronauts have traveled to the Moon on six missions, delivering over 180 kilograms of lunar soil to Earth.
Despite the consensus among the scientific community, including Russia’s scientists, that the US carried out a number of manned landings on the Moon, conspiracy theories have persisted, claiming that the missions were fictitious. These theories first gained traction following the 1976 publication of We Have Never Went to the Moon by US author Bill Keesing. A 2020 poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) showed that 49% of Russians still do not believe that US astronauts actually landed on the Moon’s surface.