Russia will "check" the lunar landing of NASA, says Roscosmos chief

What his remark has done is to highlight the widening gap of trust between East and West, as propaganda and information wars multiply and reach new heights in almost every area of ​​social media .

Dmitry Rogozin, the Roscosmos leader, was referring to a conspiracy theory that refuses to die: NASA has allied with Hollywood (some say specifically 2001: The Space Odyssey director Stanley Kubrick) to simulate a landing on the moon as a Cold War propaganda victory.

Despite mountains of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, simple jokes of this type have long contributed to keeping alive the theory, which is easy to demystify.

Rogozin was filmed during a meeting with Kgor Dodon, president of Moldova.

The question was asked: did NASA really land on the moon in 1969?

Rogozin replied, "We have set ourselves the goal of stealing and checking whether they are there or not."

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His body language places the comment in its context: it was at best a gag, at worst a sharp bite. But this is not likely to affect the crowds of conspiracy seeking any ammunition to add to their denial.

Smithsonian

What is undisputed is Russia's plan, despite its struggling economy and the heavy international sanctions imposed for its invasion of Crimea, to send its first cosmonaut to the moon in the early years. 2030. The plan is to provide enough supplies and facilities for the visit to last two weeks.

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Rogozin said he wants to cooperate with China, Europe and the United States. In 2017, Russia signed a cooperation agreement with the United States for the construction of a space station in lunar orbit, dubbed Deep Space Gateway.

ON THE MOON

NASA managed to put the first human on the moon, Neil Armstrong, in July 1969. The entire world was suspended when the Apollo 11 mission was first launched at Cape Canaveral, went into orbit, separated its lander – fell – then came back again.

And this is not the first time that Russia has questioned NASA's achievements on Moon.

As recently as 2015, the spokesperson of the Russian Investigation Committee, Vladimir Markin, called for an international investigation into the loss of high-resolution color video footage of the 1969 landings. He also questioned the existence of rock samples returned from the surface of the Moon.

Russian lunar mission

"We do not claim that they did not steal [to the Moon], and just made a movie about it, "wrote Markin. "But all these scientific artifacts – or perhaps cultural ones – are part of the legacy of humanity and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened. "

But Russia has reason to try to discredit NASA's achievements: not only has it been beaten on the surface of the moon, but it has also been forced to abandon its own moonlighting program in the middle of the moon. 1970s after the explosion of four rockets.

NASA, however, did not miss its own failures. Some 200,000 landings records have been overwritten to reduce costs. He was then forced to ask a film restoration company to retrieve and reproduce images captured by television.

To demystify lunar conspiracies

Originally released as Russia to "check" the NASA lunar landing