DISINFO: Elon Musk doesn’t believe Americans landed on the moon
SUMMARY
Elon Musk questions the success of the US lunar mission in 1969.
Many say that the Apollo programme’s $152 billion budget (in current dollar terms) proves that America sent its citizens to the moon. But others ask, what prevents the United States from investing the same money in its lunar projects? And those people conclude that Americans have not visited the moon so far.
And the founder of "SpaceX" and "Tesla", Elon Musk, considers himself a proponent of the aforementioned hypothesis.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative based on one of the most common conspiracy theories in the world that target, this time, Elon Musk.
There is a substantial amount of evidence that on July 20, 1969, astronauts landed on Earth's satellite for the first time in the history of mankind.
Since then, a total of 12 American astronauts have visited the Moon, four of them are still living as of February 2021.
The claim that Musk doesn’t believe that Americans actually reached the moon in 1969 is completely false, and his words are taken out of context.
Tracing back the original source of the shared claims, it turned out to be an author views in the “Russian information and review magazine Слово и Дело - Slovo and Delo" with no actual quote from Musk.
Some of the information related to Musk can be chased back to an article published by Space.com in November 2019, in which SpaceX CEO is boosting the image of Starship rocket noting that it will be ludicrously cheap to get into orbit, and didn’t even mention the 1969 moon landing.
Musk is quoted saying:
“If you consider operational costs, maybe it’ll be like $2 million… This is much less than even a tiny rocket, so it’s something that needs to be made”.
That sum of money, according to Space.com is “a tiny fraction of what existing launches cost, where on average, NASA spends an average of $152 million per launch — meaning that, if Musk is to be believed, SpaceX will be able to launch cargo and people into orbit for 1.3% of what NASA is currently paying for the same task”.
Furthermore, there are considerable statements from Musk noting that we should “return to the moon”.
Elon Musk, as a tech and space avid enthusiast online and offline has more than once made fun of people who think landing on the moon was a hoax (original link in this tweet revert to this article in “The Onion”), and always called for a “return on the moon” and even expressed his honour that NASA entrusted SpaceX with the Apollo 11 launchpad, calling it “first moon landing (launch pad)”. "The Onion" is an American satirical digital media.
Read similar cases in our database that claims that the space shuttle of Musk is probably made in Russia; or that the US has yet to reach the moon; or that WikiLeaks confirms that the video of the US moon landing was staged.