The head of Roscosmos, Russia’s national space agency has proposed a mission to the moon to verify whether the Apollo moon landings really took place. Dmitry Rogozin responded to a question about whether NASA’s Apollo programme actually put men on the moon back in the 1960s and 1970s during a conversation with the president of Moldova, Igor Dodon. He appeared to be joking, as he smirked and shrugged while answering. But conspiracies surrounding NASA’s moon missions are common in Russia. In a video of their interaction, posted to his 815,000 Twitter followers, Mr Rogozin says: “We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they’ve been there or not”. NASA’s six well-documented official manned missions to the surface of the Moon, beginning with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in July 1969 and continuing with Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt in December 1972, have been dogged with conspiracy theories.
The paths left by astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell on both Apollo 14 moon walks are visible in this image. (At the end of the second moon walk, Shepard famously hit two golf balls.) The descent stage of the lunar module Antares is also visible. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/ASU)
A total of 12 American astronauts walked on the moon, conducting scientific research and studying the lunar surface.
Russia details progress on its reusable nuclear rocket engine to power missions to Mars In 2015, a former spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee called for an investigation into the NASA moon landings. Vladimir Markin said an enquiry should be launched into the disappearance of original footage from the first moon landing in 1969 and the whereabouts of lunar rock, which was brought back to Earth during several missions.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites. Images show the twists and turns of the paths made when the astronauts explored the lunar surface.
More than half of Russians believe the moon landings were faked according to a poll earlier this year, Russian news site Sputnik reports. Only around 7 percent of Americans think they were a hoax. “We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it,” he wrote in an op-ed published by Russian newspaper Izvestia. “But all of these scientific – or perhaps cultural – artefacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened.” The Soviet Union abandoned its own lunar programme in the mid-1970s after four experimental moon rockets exploded. They didn't even admit they had a lunar programme until the late 1980s, after years of publicly denying it and claiming moon missions were pointless. Earlier in November, Mr Rogozin revealed plans to start building a base on the moon after 2025, with the project exceeding the US Apollo programme of the 1960s and 1970s in terms of scale. The programme will put its first humans on the moon by 2030 or 2031.
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