Since about 1976, conspiracy theories denying the Moon landing and claiming it was all faked have cropped up. As a website devoted to answering questions about space exploration, we receive questions about this idea regularly.
In order to spare the energy of this community by addressing this issue once and for all, can we summarize the numerous reasons why we know the six Apollo missions did indeed land on the Moon and return 18 astronauts to Earth?
As belief in conspiracy theories is associated with the rejection of science, it is likely that this answer will be rejected by many at the outset. If you doubt the reliability of science, perhaps you should check out this NPR article. Please note that it is an opinion piece. The author Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, not a journalist. Use your own reasoning to honestly consider his words.
If it is not the scientific method itself that you distrust, but the "scientific establishment", then you should consider the way science works. All papers are subject to review, all results are expected to be repeatable and independently verified. Individuals can and have created independent groups to ensure the integrity of their work. If there is not a significant group of scientists with expertise in a particular domain that reject a conclusion from that domain, then it would be prudent to provisionally accept that conclusion.
How, indeed, can we believe that anything we did not personally witness, did in fact happen?
That's a trick question...critical thinkers don't have to "believe" anything. As paleoanthropologist Dr. Briana Pobiner (quoted here by Adam Blankenbicker) replied when asked "You believe in evolution, right?" -
"I don't believe in evolution - I accept the evidence for evolution."
The believing isn’t what makes evolution true or not, it’s that there is evidence that supports it.
One of the obstacles to belief in any space enterprise is belief in a flat earth. Those who believe in a flat earth are aware of the idea of orbits and of images returned from space of the globe. Because of this, they assert that NASA must have faked the moon landing, as they reason the whole space enterprise must be a conspiracy to begin with.
However, since we accept science, it is easy to dismiss the possibility of a flat earth. First of all, for the dedicated and resourceful, it is possible to fly around the Earth without stopping. This may be prohibitive for the average reader, but as we discussed above, we don't have to personally witness something to accept the evidence for it. If you're interested in the evidence for a round earth, Moriel Schottlender provides a good summary on her site SmarterThanThat.
There are many reasons we know the Apollo missions landed on the Moon and returned. Here is a list summarizing the main ones:
For the layman, a common area of confusion is how rockets work in space with nothing to push against. However, the scientific principle for why this works has been understood for a long time (Newton's third law). For more information see:
Some have heard that there was scientific skepticism prior to the launch of Sputnik, but this was rooted not in doubt of Newton's laws but in concerns of the financial viability of the enterprise:
Furthermore...
The methods we use to model space flight - in particular the chemistry and thermodynamics of rocket engines - are used in every field of engineering.
The way we model the boiling of a kettle allows us to predict and demonstrate that an engine produces thrust in a vacuum. These models are not in question; one might as well claim that the engine of a car cannot function according to physics as claim the same for a rocket engine.
The International Space Station can be viewed by amateurs from the ground. With dedication, astronauts can even be spotted on spacewalks:
That said, some are willing to believe we can go to space today, but doubt the possibility of what was accomplished in the Apollo era. That leads us to...
The Soviet Union, Japan, China, and India have all, independently of NASA, verified the Moon landings. Wikipedia has a convenient collection of this third-party evidence. The Wikipedia article is well-sourced, and thus acts as a repository of information that has been gathered from places such as JAXA's website, an Indian academic journal of research, and Xinhua News Agency. It is beyond belief that there could be a conspiracy this vast to maintain a fake moon landing story. There could not even be a reasonable collective motivation. China aspires to land a manned expedition on the Moon, and they would love to one day have the opportunity to claim that they were truly the first; yet even China affirms the account of the Apollo expeditions.
One key piece of third-party evidence comes from the retroreflectors left on the Moon by three of the Apollo missions (11, 14, and 15) and by two uncrewed Soviet lunar landers. These retroreflectors have been pinged from dozens of sites all over the world; they are exactly where the US and the Soviet Union said their vehicles landed. The existence of the retroreflectors does not prove that the three US missions were crewed, but it does prove that some kind of landings occurred at those three sites.
The above points show that the Apollo program could have been taken place, and that there's lots of evidence that shows that it did take place. Could it have been fake? This leads us to ...
The Apollo astronauts took an abundance of photographs during their short stays on the Moon. The photographic evidence is very compelling, which compels the conspiracy theorists to try to debunk those photographs. These efforts inevitably fail; the lighting in every single photograph taken from the surface of the Moon is consistent with a bright light source one astronomical unit away and is inconsistent with studio lighting.
Those photographs could of course have been created as computer-generated imagery. CGI has recently been used to recreate some of the iconic photographs taken from the Moon. One of the two photographs below was taken by Neil Armstrong. The other is pure fantasy, generated by a computer.
The technology needed to produce those photographs as computer-generated images is very new (late 2014, to be precise), and even then, it wasn't easy. Such technology did not exist twenty years ago, let alone fifty years ago.
and they would love to one day have the opportunity to claim that they were truly the first; yet even China. I'm unsure why this has been limited to China, I feel like I can state with almost clear certainty that everyone would like to claim that they were truly the first, not only China. (Although I may be misunderstanding your intentions here)
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Commented
Jun 29, 2018 at 6:38
Conspiracy theories generally depend upon an absence of critical thinking. Any reasonable debunking generally requires critical thinking to cut through the misdirections, false assumptions and flawed logic upon which these theories are inevitably based.
Nevertheless...
To execute a hoax, there is need of means, a motive, an intended target, and some expectation of success.
Who would be the intended target of such a hoax? The American public? The Soviet government? The general public of the world?
If the Americans had a motive and a target for a hoax, it would have been to make the Soviet Union think they had achieved a manned Moon landing without actually doing so. The snag here is that the effort to actually execute such a hoax (without it being discovered) would probably be greater than the effort to actually do it for real. Add to that the embarrassment should such a hoax ever be unmasked. The Soviets could easily tell if a radio signal was coming from a transmitter on or orbiting the Moon vs local to Earth. They knew what it would take to put a man on the Moon - they had their own lunar landing program (conducted in secrecy to avoid the embarrassment of a public failure). The Americans could not realistically have executed a hoax without the Soviets seeing through it and calling them out.
The Moon landings occurred in the context of the Cold War Space Race. The Soviet Union, like the US, was developing nuclear bombs and the long-range ballistic missiles needed to deliver them onto targets pretty much anywhere in the world. As this was going on, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite (which could be easily tracked by radar and even seen under the right light conditions, despite its small size). No question this happened. As the Soviets continued onward to put a dog and then a man in space, the US found itself trailing behind. As they were fighting their way back toward parity, Kennedy made his famous Moon speech. The intent was to get out in front of the Soviets and do so with a clear demonstration.
The purpose of the lunar landings was to put a man on the Moon as a show of technological superiority. The point of it was not to merely make the Soviets think they had landed on the Moon, but to actually go and do it in full view of the world. The American effort was transparent in terms of what was being done, when, and why during each space mission, giving the Soviet Union (and anyone else who cared to audit the exercise) ample opportunity to verify exactly what was really going on.
The Soviets would have liked nothing better than to disclose an American hoax if it indeed was one. The fact that the Soviet leadership congratulated the Americans on their success, rather than even suggesting anything was not as claimed, speaks to the fact that everything was exactly as it appeared to be.
FWIW: I was 10 when Apollo 11 flew. I watched it all on TV, broadcast live as it happened - the launch, the lunar landing, Armstrong's first step, the splashdown. My memories aren't fake, Walter Cronkite's reporting wasn't fake. Anyone too young to have at least had that experience might be open to the notion that it never happened, even retroactively faked, but even as a 10-year old, I understood a lot about what was going on and just how real it was. The first space launch I can remember watching was Apollo 7, and I've enthusiastically followed the American (and other) space programs since then. I've read countless articles and watched endless hours of documentaries on space technology and space exploration, studied engineering, and built my career in computer technology. I am wholly satisfied the "official" public record stands unimpeached and unimpeachable.
In addition to kim holder's big post showing that we have been to space, there's the other side of it: We couldn't have faked it.
The stage needed is far beyond anything we have built to date. To get the dust to behave correctly it needs to be in vacuum. To get the light even close to right it has to be huge because you need a very distant point source of light.
What is that source of light? What do we have that is bright enough and focused enough for the job?
Running the camera overspeed makes the motion of the body look like it's in low gravity. However, doing this will also slow down limb motions and thus it doesn't look right.
We had long, continuous broadcasts during the mission. To fake that we need a camera that can record that long--and nothing close existed back then. Did they somehow manage to develop such camera technology in secret and then make it disappear? Technology doesn't just vanish like that.
The conspiracy theorists who claim the Moon landings were faked put forward a few selected artifacts of questionable provenance or authenticity and call them evidence. They interpret this "evidence" according to unsupported and arbitrary assumptions and then deem the resulting conclusions irrefutable.
To refute the historical record, every piece of evidence in existence (and there is a lot of it) must be challenged objectively and rigorously. There must be no assumptions; every conclusion must be drawn from sound logical reasoning and solid fact.
To attack this issue from a different angle, consider the minimum required manpower necessary for such an operation.
During the Apollo Project, there were over 400,000 people involved in a conspiracy that was conducted over a period of more than a decade. If all of those people were "in-the-know" during this period, there is an extremely high risk of compromise.
Let's go down the check list, in order to make that happen:
If you think of something more that could be added to this list, leave a comment. Faking the landings would be an unimaginable task, with the amount of information we have from the flights, and the number of people that would have to be involved to fake this massive, publicly visible operation.
Along with all that is described in other answers, consider that our space program rivals at the time, who would have been keen to expose a hoax, had their own lunar explorations with which to compare the NASA claims.
Begin with the Soviet Union's Luna 3, the first spacecraft from any nation to successfully reach and orbit the Moon. Luna 3 did not land a man (or woman) on the Moon, it merely provided the first views we ever saw of the far side, views with which the Apollo orbiters' "purported" Far-side images could be compared.
Later Luna missions landed unmanned craft on the Moon and even returned to Earth with samples. These automated return samples were small compared with the rocks "apparently" brought back by the Americans, but a comparison of mineral compositions was still possible.
We have more than just congratulations from the Soviets as evidence that they, who would have been motivated to do so, never claimed a hoax. We have positive comparisons between their data and ours to corroborate both the Soviet and American lunar exploration claims.
How do we know, the conspiracy theory is real?
Conspiracy theories present some facts as "evidence", neglect all facts that weaken or disprove their arguments. Also, the conspirators are some untangible dark group.
The closest real-life equivalent of a conspiracy, in the sense of conspiracy theories, are cartels, i.e. groups of companies who enrich themselves by price fixing and other nefarious practices.
How do we know that cartels exist? The are more or less frequently uncovered. Either by some actor(s) seeking crown-witness benefits, or by law enforcement. In any case, cartels come to light, given enough time. Thus, we know of their existence and we are not consigned to believe in them. They are real.
All the conspiracy theories claim some conspiracy against humanity, or a smaller subset thereof, yet, no conspiracy theory ever proofed to be
All in all, I find the conspiracy theories lacking. They claim the moon landing was faked, yet there is no evidence of large-scale collusion. All the supporting evidence are some weird artefacts in the photo-graphs, the behaviour of the flag, ... (you know it all).
If all lightbulbs in the supermarket cost nearly the same, what's the reason for this?
Feel free to apply Ockham's razor.
Answer: We know the moon landings are real because the overwhelming mass of evidence says they are real. I don't believe moon landings are real. I believe the evidence for moon landings is real.
The Moon Landing Conspiracy is a classic case of confirmation bias. This is one of the best supported and useful concepts in psychology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.[1] People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. ... Confirmation bias is insuperable (incapable of being overcome) for most people.
Humans require little or no evidence to acquire new beliefs, but demand a much higher standard of evidence to change these beliefs. In fact, evidence contrary to existing beliefs actually strengthens those beliefs.
… confirmation bias have been found in a wide range of political, organizational, financial and scientific contexts. These biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. For example, confirmation bias produces systematic errors in scientific research based on inductive reasoning (the gradual accumulation of supportive evidence). Similarly, a police detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then may only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence... In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles, or "algorithmic editing", which display to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views.
Pathetic, but that’s our species. Except me and thee. And I'm not so sure about thee.
