Subscribers send me over the Moon

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To paraphrase Captain Malcom Reynolds, “My days of not taking Kim Kardashian seriously are certainly coming to a middle.”

If you haven’t heard, in an episode of “The Kardashians”, she is recorded talking about how she thinks the Apollo Moon landings were faked — you can watch video of it here. Ms. Kardashian pulls out the hoary old canards about there being no stars in the sky in the photos and the flag waving (yawn), and also claims there’s no gravity on the Moon, which… Well. I’ve seen people say this before, and I think they’re confusing the lack of atmosphere with gravity. It’s a weirdly common misconception. — the Moon does have gravity, about 1/6^th as strong as Earth’s. That’s how the astronauts were able to land there and walk around at all.

Anyway, I debunked those first two claims almost 25 years ago, after Fox aired an atrocious “documentary” called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? where they laid out about two dozen very easily debunked claims that NASA faked the Apollo missions to the Moon. You can read the background story in an article I wrote for Scientific America in 2023 about how I got the tape of the show and put together my rebuttal. I have to note that the show changed my life; by debunking it point by point, and having it up on the (at the time brand new) web right after the show aired, it got a lot of attention. A lot. Basically, that’s what launched my career as a skeptic and debunker. 

So obviously, I’m a little conflicted about all this.

But not that conflicted. The hoax idea is still a huge flaming load of ulcerous garbage. You can see the stuff about the stars and the flag at my original site (please accept my apologies for the 2000-era design; I never updated it).

Back to Ms. Kardashian, I can’t not talk about this: she quotes a relatively new bit of nonsense about how the astronauts’ suits had smooth soles, yet the prints they left in the lunar dust are corrugated.

I debunked that one right here in this very newsletter! In Issue 353 I wrote about it, because of one of the all-time greatest ironies any skeptic has ever had the dubious pleasure to experience. Basically, the chuckleheads — pardon me, the conspiracy theorists — show a photo of Neil Armstrong’s EVA spacesuit, and you can clearly see there are no ridges on the bottoms of the feet. But that’s because they wore rubber overshoes while outside the lander, and for traction those did have ridges. At the end of the mission, those were discarded on the lunar surface along with many other items no longer needed for the trip back to Earth, to save mass and therefore fuel. Tadaa! Bunk debunked.

But the truly magnificent part of that claim is the photo they show of the suit. Why?

Because I took that photo.

Literally, that picture was taken by me when I was visiting the National Air and Space Museum to do some promotional work to raise funds to help conserve the suit. Of all the people the smooth-brained science-deniers could have used a photo from, they chose me, someone known for debunking their claims.

Amazing.

This whole situation is so irritating, though. Of course the claims themselves bug me, but what's worse is that people swallow them whole unthinkingly, without doing any sort of actual investigation. When someone makes a claim that so massively goes against historical record, everyone should have at least a little bit of skepticism about it. Yet over and again, we see people simply accepting nonsense. There may be a political implication here as well.

I'll add that I’ve been tearing apart this sort of vomitous putrescence for decades, yet here we are. I sometimes wonder if I wasted a decent chunk of my life railing against the forces of anti-intellectualism, and this sort of thing makes me want to take an EVA without a suit.

But that feeling tends to pass quickly. I know that hundreds of thousands, and maybe even millions of people either saw my original site debunking the Moon hoax or heard me talk about it on the radio or on TV in a pile of interviews I did back then. And that knowledge is still out there on my site, and on many others.

And yes, the forces of evil are in charge now, and <waves vaguely in 4 pi steradians> we’re soaking in it. But this too shall pass. One way or another, the people promulgating anti-science will go away (or at least lose power), and, hopefully, we can turn our sights back in the direction of reason^*.

Also, I’m no Pollyanna. I know nonsense will never totally go away; even together none of us can ever erase it all. But we can each clean up just our little corner of the world from it.

Anyway, my friend and space historian Amy Shira Teitel made a quick video debunking Ms. Kardashian’s claims and posted it to Bluesky:

Nice. And video of my own public debunking lecture is online too, like this one from just a few years ago when I was asked to talk at a meeting put together by the NASA Lunar Science Institute (!!). It was a serious meeting with many brilliant people who are building the next generation of lunar robotic explorers, but it became decidedly less serious once I stepped on the stage (sadly, you can’t hear the audience laughing, but I assure you that happened. OR DID IT?

Yes, it did.)

So yes, Ms. Kardashian, we did indeed go to the Moon. Six times, in fact (not including Apollos 8, 10 and 13). Twelve human beings walked on its gray, dust-laden surface, and came home safely again, bringing nearly 400 kilos of rocks back with them that are still avidly studied by scientists around the globe today.

The only hoax is the one by people trying to convince you we didn’t.

^* My real concern is the damage they do along the way to irrelevancy.

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