Did astronauts really land on the Moon?

The question has a settled answer, and it doesn't depend on taking any agency's word for it. Six Apollo missions landed on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 and brought back 382 kilograms of lunar rock and soil. That material has an unmistakable signature: no hydrated minerals, glass formed by impacts, and exposure to cosmic rays that can't be reproduced on Earth. Laboratories in dozens of countries have analyzed it, including those of the Soviet Union, which at the height of the Cold War had every incentive to expose a fraud and never did.

The crews also left retroreflector mirrors at three sites. Observatories on several continents fire laser pulses at them and measure the round-trip time to determine the Earth-Moon distance with centimeter precision. That experiment still works today and requires no one's permission: just a suitable telescope.

Since 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the surface with enough resolution to make out the abandoned descent stages, the scientific instruments, and even the footpaths and rover tracks around the landing sites. Probes from other countries, including Japan's Kaguya and India's Chandrayaan-2, have captured images consistent with that altered terrain.

Distrust feeds on details that seem anomalous but have simple physical explanations: the flag moves because it was shaken while being planted and nothing stops it, the shadows diverge because of the terrain's relief, and the lack of stars in the photos comes from exposures set for ground lit by the Sun. On top of that there's the sheer scale of the supposed hoax: nearly 400,000 people worked on the program over more than a decade without a single one producing evidence of a cover-up.