NASA we have questions!
Humanity has just completed a historic lunar flyby with Artemis II, but according to a very loud corner of the internet, the whole thing was filmed in a shed in Nevada. Now that the crew has splashed down safely in the Pacific, the skeptics are out in force. It turns out that even with 4K cameras and live streams, people still think NASA is just a very expensive movie studio.
Here are the 8 most burning questions from the people who are convinced the Artemis II mission was nothing but a high-budget hoax.
1. Where are the stars?
The classic favorite is back. Conspiracy theorists are baffled that the background of space looks like a black void instead of a glittering disco. They forget that cameras struggle with contrast; if you expose the shot for a bright white spacecraft and a glowing Earth, the faint stars simply don’t show up. It is basic photography, but “NASA forgot to turn on the star machine” makes for a much better tweet.
2. Is that a green screen?
An image went viral on X showing the crew floating in front of a green screen with film cameras pointed at them. Of course, it was a blatant AI-generated fake. In the age of deepfakes, many people find it easier to believe a robot made the video than to believe four people actually sat in a tin can for ten days.
3. Why did the mascot “glitch”?
During a live broadcast, text appeared to pass behind the mission’s stuffed toy mascot. This sent social media into a frenzy, with people claiming it was a “masking error” in a CGI render. In reality, it was just a technical hiccup from a news station overlaying their own graphics on top of the NASA feed.
4. What was that “mysterious object” on the Moon?
Rumours swirled that the crew spotted a moving object on the lunar surface. Some claim it was an alien base, others say it was a stagehand who wandered into the shot. NASA has yet to confirm any moon-men, but that hasn’t stopped TikTok from “analysing” blurry pixels until they look like a skyscraper.
5. Why is there light on the “dark side” of the Moon?
The mission flew around the far side of the Moon, and some people were shocked to see it wasn’t pitch black. They seem to think the “dark side” means “permanently unlit,” rather than just “the side we can’t see from Earth.” NASA even had to put out a statement explaining that the Sun still shines back there.+1
6. How did they survive the Van Allen radiation belts?
Skeptics are convinced that the radiation fields surrounding Earth are a deadly wall that no human can pass through. They think the astronauts should have come back as glowing skeletons. Scientists have pointed out for decades that if you move through them quickly in a shielded ship, the radiation dose is about the same as a couple of chest X-rays.
7. Why do the shadows look weird?
Just like in 1969, people are obsessed with shadows. They claim that because shadows aren’t perfectly parallel, there must be multiple studio lights involved. They ignore the fact that the lunar surface is uneven and reflective, which tends to mess with how light looks to a camera.
8. Why haven’t we been back for 50 years?
This is the “if it was so easy, why did we stop?” argument. The simple answer is money and politics, but the conspiracy answer is that we never went in the first place and just “lost the tapes.” It turns out building a giant moon rocket is actually quite hard and very expensive.
It seems that no matter how many stunning 4K views of Earth we get, there will always be someone in a basement claiming it’s a matte painting.
…. And what the Nutella is going on here!
Are you convinced by the 2026 moon footage, or do you think the “splashdown” was actually just a very large swimming pool in California?
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