Featured Image Credit: Jack Gordon via YouTube
People landing on the Moon is at the heart of one of the world's biggest conspiracy theories, yet one former NASA astronaut shuts down a fascinating claim that famous photographs of footprints shouldn't have been possible.
Eclipsed perhaps only by Flat Earthers at this point, claims that the Moon landing was faked continue to spiral throughout conspiracy theorists over 50 years since the Apollo 11 mission.
It's become such a popular viewpoint that even SpaceX employees have began to question it, although Elon Musk himself remains firm in the belief that NASA did in fact reach the Moon back in 1969, and with subsequent Apollo missions.
It's been a long time since any astronauts stepped foot on the Moon though and that's only allowed conspiracies to fester, but thankfully one man who has actually been to the Moon has taken it upon himself to shut down a number of wild claims in a new video.
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Uploaded by Jack Gordon on YouTube, this new video involves street-based interviews with Moon landing deniers, which former astronaut Charlie Duke will then react to and shut down their theories.
Duke deals with a number of popular claims throughout the video, but one in particular stands out as something that might not have been considered before.
When asked why she doesn't think the Moon landing was real, one woman proposes: "I think that out of all the photos and things, you can tell that it has to be staged."
One photo in particular has drawn her attention, and it's the famous photo of a footprint left on the Moon's surface. "This is looking like concrete," the she claims, adding that "if it was wet, you could leave a footprint in it, if it's a rock, how could you?"
It's certainly an intriguing proposal that not many have brought forward before, especially if you're under the notion that the Moon's surface is akin to that of a hard rockface on Earth, but that's not actually the truth of the matter.
Clarifying why astronauts were able to leave footprints on the Moon, Charlie Duke explains what the surface actually felt like:
"Fine fine grained sand. It was pulverized rock. There's no organic material on the Moon, so the meteorites have hit over the eons and pulverized the Moon, and all this ejector that comes out from the meteorite hitting - a lot of it is real fine grain and it settles back down onto the Moon."
From Duke's experience it seems like what you'd be walking on is far more akin to that of sand than an impenetrable hard rock, and that's how astronauts were able to create such a clear footprint that has now become one of the space world's most iconic photographs.
