Updated 25 November 2018 at 21:37 IST
After 59 years of the NASA moon landing, Russia to launch probe into it
After 59 years after the first manned mission on the moon by the United States, Russia is all set to launch a probe to find whether the NASA actually went to the moon.
59 years after the first manned mission on the Moon by the United States, Russia is all set to launch a probe to find whether the NASA actually went to the moon.
Russia's Roscosmos space agency said that they have proposed a mission to the moon in order to verify whether the Americans even ever went to the moon.
In a video posted on the space agency's Twitter page, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russian national space agency, said, "We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not."
Rogozin was responding to a question on the veracity of the moon landing by the United States and seemed to be joking as he shrugged and smirked while answering.
He was announcing a new, multi billion-rouble Moon exploration programme where Russia would send its first manned mission to the Moon after 2030. It would also be working with the NASA for a concept of a lunar orbital station.
Apparently, conspiracy theories about the American moon landing are not isolated to just pop culture. They are pretty common in Russia as nearly 57 percent of Russians believed it was faked.
In 2015, a former spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee also called for a probe over the NASA moon landing. The Russian moon landing program was abandoned in the mid-1970s as four experimental moon rockets exploded.
In 2016, a poll was conducted in the UK where 52% of Britishers said that they believed the landings did not happen. In 2013, a Pew Research Center survey said that 7 percent of Americans had doubts if the US moon landings were real.
Published By : Apoorva Rao
Published On: 25 November 2018 at 21:01 IST