Did astronauts really go to the Moon?

Between July 20, 1969 and December 14, 1972, six Apollo missions landed on the Moon: 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. Each carried three crew members, of whom two descended to the surface while the third remained in orbit, so twelve men walked on the lunar surface. Apollo 13 never landed: an onboard explosion forced the crew to loop around the Moon and return.

The missions returned 382 kg of Moon rocks and soil, material with a composition and impact history not found on Earth, which is distributed to laboratories around the world. A large part remains sealed, awaiting better instruments, and the samples already opened have been reanalyzed with techniques that did not exist in the 1970s.

Three laser reflectors were left on the surface, installed by the crews of Apollo 11, 14 and 15. Observatories in several countries fire pulses at them and measure the round-trip time, which allows the Earth-Moon distance to be known with centimeter precision. Anyone with a large telescope and a laser can verify that this equipment is where it was said to be.

During the missions, Soviet Union radars and antennas tracked the spacecraft amid the race to get there first, and civilian observatories picked up their transmissions; none of these observations depended on NASA. Decades later, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe photographed all six landing sites from orbit: the descent stages, scientific instruments, and tracks left by boots and rovers are clearly visible. The hoax hypothesis would also require the complicit silence of hundreds of thousands of participants for half a century.