Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty
Elon Musk's latest social media post about space has drawn the attention of countless Moon landing conspiracy theorists, as his his frustration has seemingly been misconstrued as disbelief.
Apollo 11's Moon landing is one of the most important events in American history, as it not only signified a victory in the highly contested space race, but also pushed the boundaries of what science and technology could achieve at the time.
While we know more about space in 2025 than ever before, having seen glimpses of habitable planets over 124 light-years away and sent astronauts on 285-day-long expeditions to the International Space Station, there remains still only a handful of times where a human has stepped foot on the Moon - with the last one happening over 50 years ago.
Both NASA and a number of private space agencies currently have their eyes set on the red planet of Mars, although a currently estimated journey time of 6 months each way has proven to be a major hurdle, yet one key figure in the industry has questioned why more isn't being done to get astronauts to the nearest floating rock again.
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Only 66 years from first flight to landing on the Moon in 1969.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2025
Here we are, 76 years later cannot yet return to the Moon. We should have been on Mars by now. https://t.co/Oo3DhxLrAl
"Only 66 years from first flight to landing on the Moon in 1969," wrote Elon Musk in one of his most recent posts on X. "Here we are, 76 years later cannot yet return to the Moon. We should have been on Mars by now."
This is certainly a hot topic in the space world, as many have pointed towards the depressing reality that money and regulation are the reason why nobody since Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan have walked on the Moon's surface, and it doesn't line up with the progression that technology saw in the 20th century.
While Musk's math is a little bit off, as it's only been 55 years since astronauts first stepped foot on the Moon, it certainly does reflect a disappointing few decades where you'd have expected further strides to have been made, even if private companies estimate that the Moon could be mined and explored further in the near future.
However, Musk's frustrations appear to have been misinterpreted by some keen to attribute his post to Moon landing conspiracies, igniting once again debates surrounding whether NASA actually made it to the Moon in the first place.
"Did we really land on the Moon in 1969," reads one of the top comments underneath the post, among a sea of other Moon landing deniers who use the fact we haven't returned for such a long time as fuel for their conspiracies.
It's such a popular sentiment that even SpaceX employees have revealed that they questioned it too, however Musk himself is firm in his beliefs when it comes to the Moon landing.
"We definitely went to the Moon. I swear. We went to the Moon several times," declared Musk in an interview with Tucker Carlson. "We one hundred percent went to the Moon," he continued, when pressed further on his views.
Despite claims from his own AI tool Grok that he's a 'significant spreader' of misinformation on the platform, Musk would likely refute any interpretations that this post in particular is an argument or proof that the Moon landing never happened, and the recent Blue Origin space flight with Katy Perry on board proves that even modern video technology isn't enough to convince some.
