NASA rejected the comments made Kim Kardashian about the 1969 moon landing and confirmed that it actually happened.
During Thursday's episode of The Kardashians, the Skims founder questioned whether space flight had ever happened, while noting her interest in conspiracy theories.
Hours after the episode aired on Hulu, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy tagged Kardashian in a post on X with a clip of her talking about her doubts and wrote: “Yes, we have already been to the moon… 6 times! And even better: [NASA Artemis] returns under the leadership [president Donald Trump]. We won the last space race, we will win this one too.”
In a scene from The Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kardashian talks to her co-star Sarah Paulson on the set of her upcoming series All's Fair.
“I'm sending you a million articles about Buzz Aldrin and the other,” Kardashian tells Paulson before reading an article that claims Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who became the second man after Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon, what the expedition's scariest moment was. Kardashian says in the article Aldrin responds, “There was no scary moment because it didn't happen. It could have been scary, but not because it didn't happen.”
Aldrin's supposed response is the reason Kardashian now believes the moon landing never happened.
“I focus on 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 saw some videos about Buzz Aldrin that said it didn't happen. Now he says it all the time in interviews. Maybe we should find Buzz Aldrin,” she suggested.
In response to Duffy, Kardashian sent a message to X and decided to use the moment to get more information about the interstellar comet, dubbed 3I/ATLAS.
“Wait… what kind of tea is on the 3I Atlas?!?!!!!!!!?????” she wrote.
Duffy responded to this question by stating that current “NASA observations indicate that this is the third interstellar comet to pass through our solar system. No aliens. No threat to life here on Earth. 3 = third I = interstellar, that is, from outside our solar system ATLAS = discovered by our Asteroid Last Alert System (ATLAS) team.”
Duffy added that he liked “your [Kardashian’s] excitement about our Artemis mission to the moon,” and then took the opportunity to invite Kardashian to the upcoming Artemis launch at JFK. Space Center. She has not publicly said whether she accepted the invitation.
It's unclear why Duffy decided to speak out on this particular issue, but he may still feel a kinship with the reality TV stars. Duffy was a cast member on The Real World: Boston in 1997 and later appeared on other MTV shows such as Road Rules: All Stars and The Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons.
Theories that the moon landing was staged or somehow faked have long been the topic of conversation on social media and beyond. As noted Institute of Physics“Every argument claiming that NASA faked the moon landing has been discredited.” The institute cites photographic, radiation and physical evidence, noting that “382 kg of lunar rock” was brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts and “has been independently verified as lunar in laboratories around the world, ruling out a US conspiracy.”
One study published in PLOS One even found that More than 400,000 conspirators would be needed to fake the moon landing.
