Moon-landing denial remains a recurring feature of online culture, resurfacing whenever distrust in institutions collides with viral media. That dynamic played out again during a recent episode of the Impaulsive, where astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked to respond directly to doubts about whether humans ever reached the Moon.
The exchange
Tyson appeared on the podcast with hosts Logan Paul and Mike Majlak when Paul framed the question cautiously, asking whether Tyson thought the Moon landings had really happened. Tyson immediately rejected the premise. “I know we went to the Moon,” he said, before adding that denial was not neutral skepticism but a form of disconnection, describing it as being “intellectually and emotionally disconnected from civilization”.Paul pushed back, focusing on the Apollo 11 footage and questioning whether the movement on screen made sense. “Don’t you think that video looked a little silly though?” he asked. “Is that really how you would bounce around on the Moon?” Tyson did not engage with the aesthetics of the footage. Instead, he returned to what could be tested, measured and verified.That approach contrasts with the response of Buzz Aldrin, who once punched a man for accusing him of faking the landing. Tyson’s reaction was quieter, but it carried its own edge.
Why physics keeps getting ignored
For Tyson, Moon-landing denial survives because people consistently overestimate how difficult the mission was while underestimating what 1960s engineering could already do. “The real issue here,” he has said, “is that if you don’t know physics, you think that getting to the Moon was harder than it actually was.”He returns to concrete evidence. Apollo astronauts brought back lunar rocks, which were distributed to laboratories around the world for independent analysis. That process, Tyson points out, is routine science, not a symbolic flourish, not a patriotic gesture. The samples still exist, and they have been studied for decades.Then there is the Saturn V rocket. It launched publicly. Its fuel capacity is known. Its performance can be calculated. The numbers explain how three astronauts could enter Earth orbit, travel to the Moon, enter lunar orbit, return to Earth and land safely. For Tyson, disbelief at that point is not skepticism but a refusal to engage with basic mechanics.
The conspiracy problem
Tyson often dismantles conspiracy theories by focusing on scale rather than motive. Faking the Moon landings, he has argued, would have required more than 400,000 people across multiple Apollo missions, under intense Cold War scrutiny, its contractors, universities and suppliers to maintain the same secret indefinitely. Statistically, conspiracies involving even a few dozen people tend to unravel. One involving hundreds of thousands would not last years, let alone decades. The simpler explanation, he argued, is that the missions happened as documented.At one point, Tyson turned the conspiracy logic back on itself, joking that if Hollywood had been asked to fake the landings, it would have been “easier to do it on location”. There is also the matter of repetition. The United States didn’t go to the Moon once. It went nine times, six successful landings and three additional missions. A hoax would have required every one of those missions to be staged without a single technical slip, leak or inconsistency, under intense global scrutiny. For Tyson, that alone makes the hoax narrative harder to sustain than the missions themselves.
Why he keeps returning to it
Tyson continues to advocate for space exploration, frequently discussing current efforts such as NASA’s Artemis Program, which aims to return humans to the Moon. He frames Apollo not as a miraculous outlier, but as an early chapter in a longer, ongoing story of engineering progress.
That perspective also explains why he remains blunt about denial. For Tyson, the persistence of Moon-landing conspiracies isn’t evidence of a flawed past, but an unintended side effect of success. “The fact that we have people living and walking among us in denial of where engineering and science has taken us,” he has said, “is itself a compliment for how far civilization has become.”
