ALBAWABA - NASA, the U.S. space agency, has responded to reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who said in public that she thinks the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 was staged. This brought back a conspiracy theory that scientists and historians have long dismissed.
Kardashian said on a recent episode of her Hulu show "The Kardashians" that she doesn't think astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ever really landed on the Moon. She said she believed him because of a video interview with Aldrin in which she thought he suggested that the mission "never happened." Kardashian said on the show, "I saw this clip where he said there wasn't a scary moment because it didn't happen." "So I don't think it ever did."
The claim quickly spread online, bringing up the long-running theory that the moon landing was a hoax. This idea, which first gained popularity in the 1970s, says that NASA faked the Apollo mission footage.
NASA and the Government Set the Record Straight
Sean Duffy, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and acting NASA administrator, quickly responded to Kardashian's comments on X (formerly Twitter) by writing: "Yes, Kim Kardashian, we've been to the Moon six times before!"
Duffy stressed that the US successfully sent astronauts to the Moon six times between 1969 and 1972 and reaffirmed NASA's commitment to going back.
He also said that NASA plans to go back to the Moon in 2026 under President Donald Trump. The Artemis II mission will send astronauts on a 10-day lunar orbit, followed by a crewed landing in 2027. Duffy wrote, "We won the last space race, and we'll win this one too."
Buzz Aldrin's Words Taken Out of Context
It looks like Kardashian got it wrong because of something that happened in 2015 at the Oxford Union in the UK, when Aldrin was asked about "the most frightening moment" of the Apollo 11 mission.
He is said to have stopped for a moment before answering with a funny, "The scariest?" "It didn't happen—it could have been scary," he said, before going on to talk about a small technical problem with a circuit breaker during the mission.
People who believed in conspiracy theories and, it seems, Kardashian, later shared the exchange online without knowing what it was about.
Kardashian and NASA spokespeople did not respond.
As of Friday, NASA had not made any official statements other than Duffy's post. Representatives for Kim Kardashian and Buzz Aldrin did not respond right away to requests for comment from the media.
The Apollo 11 mission, which was shown live to millions of people around the world, is still one of the most well-documented achievements in human history. However, as Kardashian's comments show, it still gets some skepticism more than 50 years later.
