Although most work at NASA has ground to a halt due to Trump’s shutdown, science missions continue to deliver. The people working on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) have now released an image of the landing site of the Chinese lander Chang’e-4 that touched down on January 3.
The image was taken on December 8, 2018, before the lander arrived and shows the landing site orientated to match the images taken by Chang'e-4 as it slowly touched down on the lunar surface. Hopefully, we’ll see a post-landing image of the area soon.
Some people hope that this current picture and future ones might squash conspiracy theorists' claim that China didn’t really land on the Moon. As reported in the Metro, alien hunter Scott C Waring of UFO Sightings Daily said: “I guess China may have decided since NASA faked the first Apollo Moon landing and got away with it, then China wanted in on it too.”
We have pictures of the landing sites from orbit, samples taken by the astronauts, and even a project that shot lasers at a mirror left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts. But the conspiracy theorists don’t care about evidence. Just like anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers, this is not a conversation about facts. It’s a conversation about feelings.
These people want to feel that they have been lied to, that there’s something lurking in the shadows and them, only them, have seen the light. The Moon landing happened. 400,000 people in the US worked on it. Did NASA pay them all off for life to keep quiet?
And what about the Russians? Did the US pay them to be quiet too? I’m sure that a competing superpower would simply oblige and never ever share such a piece of information about an enemy! And what about the people that continue to work with lunar material or on lunar missions. How much is NASA paying them?
Believing that the Moon landing never happened is believing that every single US government over the last 50 years has been incredibly organized, united, and bipartisan. Occam’s razor at the ready, I know perfectly well which argument sounds like farfetched sci-fi and which one is the most reasonable explanation.
[H/T: Metro]
