Nasa has rejected comments made by Kim Kardashian about the 1969 moon landing and confirmed that it did, in fact, happen.
During Thursday’s episode of The Kardashians, the Skims founder questioned whether the space mission ever took place while noting her interest in conspiracy theories.
Hours after the episode was broadcast on Hulu, Nasa acting administrator Sean Duffy tagged Kardashian in a post on X with the clip of her talking about her doubts and wrote: “Yes, we’ve been to the Moon before… 6 times! And even better: [NASA Artemis] is going back under the leadership of [president Donald Trump]. We won the last space race and we will win this one too.”
In the scene on The Kardashians, Kardashian is talking to her co-star, Sarah Paulson, on the set of her upcoming TV series All’s Fair.
“I’m sending you a million articles with both Buzz Aldrin and the other one,” Kardashian tells Paulson, before reading an article that claims Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who became the second person, after Neil Armstrong, to walk on the moon, what the scariest moment of the expedition was. Kardashian says the article features Aldrin responding with: “There was no scary moment because it didn’t happen. It could’ve been scary, but it wasn’t because it didn’t happen.”
Aldrin’s alleged response is why Kardashian says she now believes the moon landing never happened.
“I center conspiracies all the time,” she says in a confessional moments later, before telling a producer that she definitely thinks the landing was fake.
“I think it was fake. I’ve seen a few videos on Buzz Aldrin talking about how it didn’t happen. He says it all the time now, in interviews. Maybe we should find Buzz Aldrin,” she suggested.
In response to Duffy, Kardashian volleyed a post on X back and decided to use the moment to obtain more information about the interstellar comet dubbed 3I/ATLAS.
“Wait…. what’s the tea on 3I Atlas?!?!!!!!!!?????” she wrote.
Duffy responded to that question by saying Nasa’s current “observations show that this is the third interstellar comet to pass through our solar system. No aliens. No threat to life here on Earth. 3 = the third I = interstellar, meaning from beyond our solar system ATLAS = discovered by our Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) team.”
Duffy added that he loved “your [Kardashian’s] excitement about our Artemis mission to the Moon”, then took the opportunity to invite Kardashian to the upcoming Artemis launch at the Kennedy Space Center. She has not publicly indicated if she has accepted the invitation.
It’s unclear why Duffy chose to weigh in on this particular remark, but perhaps he still feels a kinship with reality TV stars. Duffy was a cast member in The Real World: Boston in 1997, subsequently appearing in other MTV shows such as Road Rules: All Stars and Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons.
Theories that the moon landing was staged or falsified in any way have long been a topic of conversation on social media and beyond. As noted by the Institute of Physics, “every single argument claiming that Nasa faked the Moon landings has been discredited”. The institute cites photographic, radiation and physical evidence, noting that “382kg of moon rock” were brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts and “have been independently verified as lunar by laboratories around the world, ruling out a US conspiracy”.
One study, published in PLOS One, even found that a faked moon landing would require over 400,000 conspirators.
