NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has confirmed that the astronaut who landed on the moon in 1969 is indeed real after a celebrity on US television said: “I think it's fake.”
NASA has refuted Kim Kardashian's comments about the 1969 moon landing and insisted it actually happened. During Thursday's episode of The Kardashians, the socialite questioned whether the space mission ever happened, noting that she is interested in conspiracy theories, The Guardian writes.
Hours after the episode aired, Acting Nas Administrator Sean Duffy tagged Kardashian in a social media post with a clip of her talking about her doubts and wrote: “Yes, we've been to the moon before… 6 times! And even better: NASA's Artemis mission is returning under the leadership of President Donald Trump. We won the last space race and we will win this one too.”
In a scene from Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kardashian talks to co-star Sarah Paulson on the set of her upcoming TV series, Keep It Real.
“I'm going to send you a million articles about both Buzz Aldrin and everyone else,” Kardashian told Paulson before reading an article claiming that Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who became the second person after Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon, recounted the scariest moment of the expedition.
Kardashian said in the article Aldrin responded: “There was no scary moment because it didn't happen. It may have been scary, but it wasn't because it didn't happen.”
Aldrin's alleged response is why Kardashian says she now believes the moon landing never happened.
“I always encounter conspiracies,” the young woman admitted in a moment of confession that followed, before telling the producer that she definitely believed the landing was fake. “I think it's fake. I've seen some videos of Buzz Aldrin saying it didn't happen. He always says it in interviews. Maybe we should find Buzz Aldrin?”, Kim suggested.
In response to Duffy's response, Kardashian posted and decided to take some time to find out more information about the interstellar comet, dubbed 3I/ATLAS.
Duffy answers this question by saying that current NASA observations “show that this is the third interstellar comet to pass through our solar system. No aliens. No threat to life on Earth. 3 = third “I” = interstellar, that is, from beyond our solar system “ATLAS” = detected by our Asteroid Final Warning System (ATLAS) team.”
Duffy added that he liked “your (Kardashian) excitement about our Artemis moon mission,” and then took the opportunity to invite Kardashian to the upcoming Artemis launch at Kennedy Space Center. She has not publicly said whether she will accept the invitation or not.
It's unclear why Duffy decided to make this particular comment, but perhaps he still feels a kinship with the reality TV stars. Duffy was a cast member on The Real World: Boston in 1997, then appeared on other MTV shows like Road Rules: All Stars and The Real World/Road Rules Showdown: Battle of the Seasons, The Guardian recalls.
Theories that the moon landing was somehow staged or faked have long been a topic of discussion on social media and beyond. As the Institute of Physics notes, “any argument that NASA faked the moon landing is refuted.” The institute cited photographic, radiological and physical evidence, noting that “382 kilograms of moon rocks” were brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts and “have been independently confirmed to be lunar by laboratories around the world, ruling out a US conspiracy.”
A study published in PLOS One even found that a fake moon landing would require more than 400,000 conspiracy members.
