Moon Landings, Flat Earth & The Demise of Thinking
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” - Einstein
As I watch the Artemis 2 mission making history, I’m painfully reminded that the rest of us back here on earth have to share it with a lot of people who can’t seem to grapple with reality. The stream of conspiracy theory comments are unreal. So, I thought I’d post a handful of notes I’ve made over the years on this topic. Not that it will change many minds, but in the hope that just one turns back toward actual thinking...
Following are a TINY handful of common “arguments” against the moon landings. There are many more, but most are so asinine they’re not even worth debating - or they’re based on extremely ignorant assumptions about lighting, photography, physics, etc., and are easily countered by a 5 second search.
First things first
There wasn’t “a moon landing” - there were SIX! Apollo 11 was the first landing, but there were 5 more after that, each with a 2-man crew (plus a 3rd man who stayed in lunar orbit in the Command Module): Apollo 12 through 17. Apollo 13 didn’t land because of the in-flight explosion. So, 12 men walked on the moon from 1969-1972. Apollo 8 orbited the moon in December 1968. All told, seven 3-man crews have “been to” the moon; 12 men walked on it. As I write this in April 2026, 4 more are orbiting the moon from a whole new generation!
“We faked it.”
Just a few things to ponder, out of countless other points worth considering:
1. If it were really plausible to convincingly fake the moon landings in the late 60s/early 70s, don’t you think the Soviets would have done that first, given the stakes of being first to the moon? Instead, they monitored our radio transmissions, telemetry data, etc. and could have easily debunked it if it weren't happening. And then they congratulated us on the accomplishment - despite being our cold war enemy and space race opponent.
2. Almost half a million people worked on the project. Do you really think that many people perfectly kept such a secret for over 6 decades, along with the foreign governments who would love to have debunked it?
3. Pictures of the landing sites have been taken by other countries (Japan, China and India), in addition to those taken by our own Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. You can make out the astronaut’s footprint trails, the flag, various experiments, the lunar rover tire tracks, and of course the landers themselves.
4. The Laser Ranging Retroreflector (LRRR) experiment placed by Buzz Aldrin is still in use today; we can precisely measure the distance of the moon by bouncing lasers off of this mirror - from Earth!
5. Millions of people watched - both in person and on TV - the successful launches of over a half dozen Saturn V rockets, each weighing over 6 million pounds. Those marvels of engineering - likely the most complex machines ever devised by man - disappeared into the sky. Where did they go? Do you really believe we were capable of designing, building, and launching those monsters, only to stop in earth orbit? Can you not entertain the idea that after all that, the rest of the trip is a lot less complicated by comparison? You remember Newton’s First Law from science class?
So, it's not a matter of “believing” it happened. There are mountains upon mountains of evidence across many branches of science, verifiable historical records, publicly viewable artifacts, pictures of the landing sites, 842 pounds of moon rocks, on and on and on. It's not even up for debate in any serious circles.
“So why have we not gone back?”
WE DID - FIVE MORE TIMES! There were 6 moon landings total. But let’s back up a second: this question makes light of just how costly and complicated it was to go to the moon: it makes it sound like a simple undertaking. You have to remember it was extraordinarily expensive: estimates are that it was about 4.4% of the entire national budget in those years; NASA’s budget is now just 0.4% - just a tenth of what it was in the Apollo years!
Second, there was obviously a huge incentive to beat the USSR to the moon, along with the scientific objectives. We did it, and then some. After 6 successful landings, the program got canceled after Apollo 17 because there simply wasn't any justifiable need to keep going, and spending such exorbitant amounts of money.
“NASA lost the technology.”
This is simply laughable.. There are exhibits of flight-ready and even flight-used hardware on display around the world, including several flown Apollo command modules. NASA kept 85-90% of all documentation & blueprints related to the programs which you can see for yourself online. Furthermore, everything NASA has done in the decades since has built on the lessons learned from Apollo. The Artemis 2 mission I’m streaming while I type owes much to the Apollo days.
“It’s all Photoshop/CGI/AI.”
The Apollo landings took place 1969-1972. Look up “Pong” - one of the first video games in 1972. That was the state of the art. The first version of Photoshop was released in 1988, and realistic CGI didn’t hit until the mid-1990s, almost 3 decades after the Apollo missions. Realistic AI has only been a thing since around 2024. There were THOUSANDS of high-quality pictures, films, and videos of the earth and moon from space, decades before the ability to fake them with modern technology. We’ve been able to live-stream high quality video from space for years now, and it can easily be verified that what you’re seeing is in real time. In short, you sound about as smart as a screen door on a submarine.
“NASA means ‘to deceive’ in Hebrew”
First off, NASA is an acronym, not a word. It stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Second, It's a coincidence that the acronym NASA has anything at all in common with any Hebrew words. In order to claim it means "to deceive”, you'd have to be pretty bad at Hebrew and/or just not care at all about the truth. Funny enough, there is a Hebrew word that looks very similar though - נשׂא - nasa' - which means “to lift up” or “to carry.” You know, like a rocket. So there’s that.
“But the government lies!”
Finally something we can agree on! Look, I share a general distrust for much of my government and people in power; all you have to do is look at the handling of COVID. What an insane stretch of history. But that doesn't mean 500,000 people who worked on the Apollo program, everyone in my government, and the governments of every other country around the world - several of which would jump at the chance to disprove such a feat - are all lying about the moon landings. What would be the point? Yes, the moon landings were quite the “production.” But as the famous quote goes, "it was easier to just film it on location."
“The Van Allen Radiation Belt would prevent going to the moon.”
It's amazing when people with no scientific qualifications cite the Van Allen radiation belts, and talk authoritatively about not being able to pass through them, as evidence we didn't go to the moon. Mind you, this is something they believe based solely on something they've read or seen, about something they have no working knowledge of... yet they refuse to believe the literal mountain of evidence and testimony from countless other scientific, engineering, and historical sources.
Fact: the Apollo & Artemis missions successfully passed through the Van Allen belts because crews traveled through them very quickly, spending only 1-2 hours total in the radiation zones. The spacecraft shielding, combined with a trajectory designed to avoid the most intense inner regions, kept radiation exposure well within safe limits. The threat was overestimated early on; actual exposure on Apollo 14 was only 1.14 rads, far below the threshold for radiation illness.
“I saw Bart Sibrel challenge astronauts to swear on the Bible that they went to the moon, and they wouldn’t do it.”
OK, let’s make this easy for those of you for whom critical thought doesn’t seem to be a strong suit. For the rest of you reading along, this will be refreshingly entertaining. Here are 2 videos rightfully putting the grifter-king of moon landing deniers in his place:
Part 1 - https://youtu.be/o5LBAepwBfc?si=VL2M7ZdGQaoXUNSQ
Part 2 - https://youtu.be/BXOgYRa9mX8?si=CQZWFN0g1jiKMDQt
Sibrel is an embarrassment to himself and the profession of journalism; he’s been exposed a liar and a con artist.
“Buzz Aldrin even admitted to an 8-year-old that we didn’t go.”
Sigh. Does ANYBODY know how out-of-context quotes work? You can find the whole thing in a 10 second google search. If Buzz meant we never went to the moon, then the rest of his answer wouldn’t make any sense. He was talking about why we haven’t gone BACK.
BONUS
“Who filmed the landings? The flag was waving! The shadows look weird! Where are the stars? Why can’t we see the landing sites with a telescope?”
These are the questions that really start to make you wonder if there’s any intelligent life left on earth. Every one of them has been explained over and over, and it’s depressing that they need to be. If you’re at least smart enough to type dumb questions, you should be able to manage a Google search. Give it a try. I’ll even give you one for free: go outside on a sunny day and look up. Where are the stars? Don’t see any? Same principle with photography on the moon. Now it’s up to you to find the other answers - go ahead, you can do it!
And now, let’s move on to…
FLAT EARTH
I’ll keep this much shorter, as it’s pointless to have to argue something so ridiculous that’s been proven ad nauseam for millennia.
First things first: what would be the point of a conspiracy to make people think the earth is spherical? What could possibly be gained by that? Now just a couple favorite flat-earth arguments:
“Water is always flat - it can’t stick to a sphere.”
Water does "bend" with gravity/centrifugal force: we can observe water on the surface of other planets/moons (which are all spheres BTW), and it will "stick" to the sides of a centrifuge when spinning.
“If the earth is really a ball spinning at 1000 mph, we’d all fly off.”
This one is just here for entertainment value, and shows the level of absurdity we’re arguing against. But for the sake of education: that assumption makes it sound like that rotation is fast. It’s not. You want to see it in real time? Go watch the hour hand on an analog clock: it’s literally a synchronized model of the earth’s rotation at the equator!
Observations/Questions
Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras. Isaac Newton all demonstrated a spherical earth. In 240 BC (2266 years ago), Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference with impressive accuracy using the angle of shadows in different cities. Ferdinand Magellan proved it by circumnavigating the globe in the 1500s. You can FaceTime someone on the other side of the planet right now and ask them to point their phone out the window. There are 24 time zones, and the sun “sets” at a different time in each of them. You can watch a ship “sink” into the horizon, proving a spherical earth. You can even see the curvature of the earth out the window of almost any transatlantic flight! I had the privilege of flying on private jets in my music career, some of which can get up to 45,000 feet, which is significantly higher than most commercial flights. From the jumpseat, with about 180° field of view, I can assure you, the curvature of the Earth is easily visible.
Every Lunar eclipse shows a round shadow of earth, and since it’s rotating, that proves a sphere. Every planet, moon and star we can observe are all spherical. Why would earth be the only planet in the solar system (let alone the larger universe) that is flat or dome-shaped?!
“But the Bible talks about the Firmament.”
Insert gigantic eyeroll here. And not because of anything in the Bible, but because of how people hang entirely foolish arguments on one badly misunderstood Hebrew word, when science clearly tells an irrefutable story. And by the way, one doesn’t need to pit the Bible and science against each other, but that’s another topic for another time.
For anyone interested in a biblically and scientifically harmonized approach to this stuff, this article is a great start:
https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/apologetics/is-the-earth-really-round/
“Why such a sarcastic tone? You’re not being very nice to moon landing deniers and flat earthers.”
Because truth matters. As I write this, I’m especially thinking of those who claim a Christian worldview while perpetuating foolish ideas, and thereby harming the cause of Christ. You’re not doing Jesus any favors, not to mention his followers who want to be taken seriously in the marketplace of ideas.
While I always want to respect people, many of the ideas discussed here are worthy of some healthy sarcasm if not outright ridicule. We’re in 2026, and it’s depressing that we even need to discuss a lot of this stuff.
I get that most folks don’t have any scientific background, photography expertise, etc., so they don’t grasp why some “perspectives” are silly. I have a lot of grace for that. But the crowd full of arrogant, smug belligerence - those who steadfastly refuse to grapple with proven reality - it’s hard to take them seriously.
The space program/moon landings are probably the most documented events in human history, and to make baseless claims about it being faked are not only an insult to the countless people who worked on those programs (some of whom lost their lives in the process), they are the height of willful ignorance in the face of endless evidence.
As for the flat earth crowd, well, let’s ponder a great quote by Thomas Brackett Reed: “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.”