“Was it faked?” — the answers

Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions landed twelve astronauts on the Moon. Ever since, a few people have claimed the landings were faked and filmed on Earth. Polls have found that a minority of people in some countries believe this. It is a good question to ask, because asking ‘how do we know?’ is how science works. The answer is that we have many separate kinds of evidence, and they all fit together.

This spot on the 3D Moon looks at the most common doubts one by one: the ‘waving’ flag, the missing stars, the odd shadows. Each one has a clear, simple explanation. Then there is evidence anyone can check today, such as mirrors on the Moon that observatories still hit with lasers, and photos from a spacecraft orbiting the Moon that show the landers still sitting where they were left.

The flag and the stars

In videos, the flag seems to wave, but there is no wind on the Moon. The astronauts knew a flag would just hang down in airless space, so a horizontal rod held it out along the top. It moved only while they twisted the pole into the ground, and with no air to slow it, it kept swinging a little longer than it would on Earth. Wrinkles from being folded made it look rippled in photos. Stars are missing from the pictures because the cameras were set for the bright, sunlit ground. Try photographing a lit-up street at night: the stars disappear for the same reason.

Shadows and rocks

Some say shadows point in different directions, so there must have been studio lights. But shadows also look different when the ground is bumpy or sloped, and when a photo flattens a 3D scene. If there had been several lamps, each object would cast several shadows, and no Apollo photo shows that. Sunlight bouncing off the bright lunar soil also lights up the shadowed sides. The astronauts also brought back Moon rocks, which scientists in many countries have studied for decades. Their chemistry is different from Earth rocks in ways that would be very hard to fake.

Evidence you can check today

Apollo 11, 14 and 15 left special mirrors called retroreflectors. They need no power, so they still work. Observatories on Earth fire laser pulses at them and time how long the light takes to come back, about 2.5 seconds for the round trip, measuring the Earth-Moon distance to within millimetres. Since 2009, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the landing sites from above, showing the lander bases, rover tracks and the astronauts’ footpaths. In 2012, its images showed that five of the six flags were still standing. The Apollo 11 flag was knocked over by the engine blast when the astronauts left, just as Buzz Aldrin reported at the time. The Soviet Union, America’s rival in the space race, tracked the missions too and never said they were faked.

On the 3D Moon

On the 3D Moon this exhibit sits in the middle of the near side, in Sinus Medii, the ‘Bay of the Center’. Open its card for quick answers about the flag, the missing stars and the laser mirrors.