the real reason why some people still think the moon landing was a hoax

The idea that the Moon landing was faked has by now been debunked by just about everyone and their twice removed sister-in-law's grandma. So, how is it still around?!

Did you know that conspiracy theorists are secretly right and the Moon landing was indeed staged? The only problem is that NASA hired Stanley Kubrick, who insisted on shooting on location. Or at least that’s the joke popular science writers and skeptics tell each other after once again confronting raving Moon hoaxers screaming that one of the most important events in all of human history never actually happened, which at this point is becoming downright sacrilegious.

But, to borrow from Michael Scott, why are they the way that they are? Why try to erase one of the most important and profound human achievements for some weird, clichéd, harebrained statement about government corruption and lies? Well, around the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, editors at Popular Mechanics decided to ask that same question and the answer they found was actually very sad and often overlooked during endless debunkings.

It’s not just that the theorists are so focused on proving themselves right that in their obsession over how a shadow fell in some photos they forget that on an alien world with no atmosphere, no liquid water, and just a sixth of the gravity, things work very differently. It’s not just that they read volumes of meaning into every stray phrase or even pause to trumpet that they’ve found a confession from the astronauts or NASA engineers. It’s not that they forget that lunar regolith is reflective.

It’s that they can’t believe we were able to accomplish such a massive leap into the future and then just… stopped. Just consider the quote from conspiracy theorist and filmmaker Bart Sibrel, famous for shoving a Bible into Buzz Aldrin’s face demanding the astronaut swear that he walked on the Moon with his hand on it, and getting his clock cleaned in response.

Fifty years after the first atomic bomb, do you know how much more powerful they were? Ten years later, they were a hundred times more powerful! If they went to the moon with 1969 equipment, we should be in another solar system by now. We should have been on Mars 40 years ago.

In this short quip, he paradoxically reveals his ignorance about how space travel really works, but also poses a genuine, valid question. We’ll get to the question in a bit, but first we need to discuss the basic and naive errors of his diagnosis. Technology can’t always advance at an exponential rate, especially when tackling the laws of physics. It was one thing to get to the Moon. That’s relatively easy compared to crewed missions to Mars, which is 143 times farther away at its closest approach to Earth.

And other solar systems? Out of the question since chemical rockets will always mean thousands of years of travel to our closest stars, and other propulsion methods we’re trying to build are bumping up against the very limits of our knowledge of high energy physics. But we could have been using the Moon as a proving ground for decades and sending crews to Mars over the last ten years or so in the best-case scenario, which we all know didn’t happen after the superpowers gave up on nuking, or militarizing it.

Conversely, the reason why nuclear weapons were a hundred times more powerful ten years after the first ones were used is because the government poured immense resources into the research and development of new generations of these bombs no matter the dangers, complexities, or the price tags.

Just imagine that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki there were a few more tests to show how reliable we could make future nukes, then President Truman told the scientists in charge that work on these weapons was no longer a priority and their funding would have to play second fiddle to other policy concerns. Sure, those plans for a two-stage fission-fusion device from Teller and Ulam are lovely but will have to wait for now.

Would we even have a working thermonuclear warhead today, much less seriously plan for what might happen if we unleashed a hundred of them during a geopolitical conflict? Maybe a few prototypes would be built, one or two of them tested to study their general feasibility, but we wouldn’t have thousands of ICBMs and miniaturized warheads which, along with developing and building the bombs themselves cost $5.8 trillion in today’s dollars.

That’s ten times what the United States government invested in space research and exploration. And yes, my hypothetical scenario in which Truman rushes to smother the nuclear program after its biggest accomplishment seems rather bizarre, but that is exactly what happened to NASA with President Nixon.

Why don’t we have bases on the Moon? Why aren’t we landing on Mars? Because after the Apollo missions, NASA was told that big projects like this were wasteful and having won the race to the Moon, the country will be focusing its energies elsewhere. The agency would no longer be special and will compete with other departments for every scrap of funding and may not get its wish list. In politicians’ minds, the rocketry that got astronauts to the Moon was started as precursors to ICBMs, so now that the mission was accomplished, they could get back to the business of making ICBMs and nukes until they could end the world in a matter of 45 minutes.

We effectively sacrificed bases on the Moon and Mars for 25,000 nuclear warheads pointed at the other side of the world, and the Soviet Union did the same thing after the epic failure of its N1 rocket. Conspiracy theorists on both sides don’t want to live in such a sad world ruled by such paranoid and small-minded gerontocrats, and so they justify this state of affairs by claiming we simply didn’t go to the Moon and lack the technology, which is why we’re not launching missions to it today, or we did and were scared off by aliens so we’re afraid to return.

This a lot less painful than knowing that today, we could’ve been exploring our solar system for the price of the last major round of tax cuts for the 1% and Fortune 100 companies and chose to just hand over more cash to those already holding 45 cents of every dollar on Earth. But the fact of the matter is that it’s exactly what happened and if we’re ever going to change the current situation, we have to recognize it for what it is rather than embrace a reality we find more comforting and less absurd.

note: this is an updated version of a post originally written on 07.22.2019, edited for style and with additional links for background information and further reading.