By Mark Keenan
August 27, 2026
More than half a century after Apollo, NASA's continuing struggle to return people to the lunar surface raises questions that deserve far more scrutiny.
In July 1969, NASA told the world that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had travelled approximately 240,000 miles from Earth, descended to the lunar surface, walked on the Moon, launched from it, rendezvoused with a spacecraft in lunar orbit and returned safely to Earth.
NASA claims it did not accomplish this extraordinary feat just once. Between 1969 and 1972, six Apollo missions supposedly landed twelve astronauts on the Moon. Apollo 17 allegedly completed the sixth successful landing in December 1972.
I do not believe these claimed lunar landings occurred as NASA presented them. In my book Fake Moon Landings and the Lies of NASA, I examine numerous aspects of the Apollo story that I believe seriously undermine the official account.
But there is another question that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
If the United States really possessed a reliable capability to land human beings on the Moon more than half a century ago, why has returning there proved so extraordinarily difficult?
Six Moon Landings - Then Nothing for More Than Half a Century
The official Apollo story is extraordinary not merely because NASA claims to have landed astronauts on the Moon in 1969. NASA says it did it six times.
Apollo 11 supposedly landed in July 1969. Apollo 12 followed only four months later. After the aborted Apollo 13 mission, Apollo 14, 15, 16 and 17 allegedly achieved four further lunar landings between 1971 and 1972.
According to this account, America did not possess some fragile experimental capability that worked once by good fortune. NASA had supposedly developed a functioning system capable of repeatedly carrying men approximately a quarter of a million miles from Earth, landing them on another world, and bringing them safely home.
And all this supposedly happened with 1960s technology. There was no modern Internet, no operational GPS system, and nothing approaching today's computing power or computer-aided engineering capabilities.
Yet after Apollo 17 in December 1972, human beings supposedly never travelled to the Moon again. More than half a century passed.
What Happened to This Extraordinary Technology?
NASA and defenders of the Apollo programme offer explanations.The Saturn V production infrastructure was dismantled. Engineers retired or died. Suppliers disappeared. Manufacturing methods changed and components became obsolete.
There is truth in parts of this explanation. NASA's own historical record states that Administrator James Webb declined in 1968 to fund long-lead items for Saturn V rockets beyond the original fifteen vehicles, effectively bringing the production line toward an end. Subsequent budget reductions resulted in planned Apollo missions being cancelled.
But this does not make the underlying question disappear.
Technological civilisation normally progresses by retaining knowledge and building upon it. We stopped manufacturing countless aircraft, automobiles and computers from the 1960s. That does not mean we lost the ability to manufacture aircraft, automobiles or computers.
The technologies became better.
NASA's account asks us to believe something considerably stranger concerning lunar travel: the organisation supposedly mastered one of the most extraordinary transportation and engineering achievements in history, demonstrated that capability repeatedly, abandoned it, and then spent decades attempting to develop it again.
NASA's account asks us to believe something considerably stranger concerning lunar travel: it supposedly mastered one of the most extraordinary transportation and engineering achievements in history, repeatedly demonstrated it, abandoned it, and then spent decades attempting to develop the capability again.
That does not prove by itself that Apollo was fabricated. But if the Apollo record is already disputed on other grounds, the disappearance of the capability becomes highly relevant.
NASA Really Did Lose Important Apollo Material
It is sometimes claimed that NASA simply "lost all the Apollo technology." That formulation is too broad and makes an otherwise legitimate issue easier to dismiss. What actually happened is more specific - and remarkable enough without exaggeration.
NASA investigated the disappearance of the original telemetry tapes containing the raw slow-scan television signal received during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Its own investigation concluded that the tapes were most likely erased and reused during a shortage of magnetic tape in the early 1980s. Approximately 45 tapes associated with the original Apollo 11 television transmission were believed to have been affected.
Think about the significance of that.
NASA describes Apollo 11 as the first occasion on which human beings walked upon another celestial body - one of the most important events in the history of civilisation. Yet original recordings associated with that event were apparently erased and reused.
Now Compare Apollo With Artemis
The Apollo story becomes even more difficult to accept at face value when we compare it with NASA's twenty-first-century attempt to return astronauts to the Moon. NASA's Artemis programme has consumed enormous resources.
The NASA Office of Inspector General projected approximately $93 billion in Artemis-related expenditure from fiscal years 2012 through 2025 and estimated the production and operating cost of a single SLS/Orion launch at approximately $4.1 billion.
And yet putting human beings back on the lunar surface remains a formidable challenge. NASA has changed the Artemis architecture again.
Artemis III, previously intended to return a crew to the lunar surface, is now planned for 2027 as a rendezvous and docking demonstration in what NASA describes as "low Earth orbit." NASA currently targets Artemis IV in 2028 for what it says will be the first crewed lunar landing of the Artemis era.
In other words, almost six decades after Apollo 11 supposedly put men on the Moon, NASA is still developing and testing the systems required to do it again. We are therefore being asked to reconcile two remarkable propositions.
In 1969, using 1960s technology, NASA supposedly transported astronauts to the Moon, landed them safely, allowed them to walk on its surface, launched them back into lunar orbit and returned them to Earth.
In 2026, despite enormous advances in computing, materials science, robotics, communications, simulation and engineering, NASA is spending billions in pursuit of what it describes as a return of people to the lunar surface. At what point does asking questions become more rational than simply accepting the story?
"But Apollo Had Enormous Funding"
Defenders of the Apollo account point to the extraordinary expenditure and political commitment behind Apollo, as well as today's different bureaucratic and safety requirements. NASA also maintains that Artemis is intended to accomplish more than simply repeat Apollo. These explanations may account for some differences between the programmes, but they do not resolve the central question examined here.
Imagine if commercial aviation had reached the jet age and then stopped crossing oceans for fifty years while engineers attempted to rediscover how to do it. We would reasonably ask what had happened.
My scepticism about Apollo does not rest upon Artemis alone. It arises from a much broader examination of the Apollo record: photographic and video anomalies, questions concerning the engineering and documentary evidence, missing original material and the way the story has been presented to the public. I examined several of these issues in my 2024 article on the Apollo evidence and NASA's visual record.
My conclusion after investigating this subject is that NASA has not provided convincing evidence that men landed on the Moon during the Apollo programme.
Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence
For more than half a century, the Apollo Moon landings have occupied a peculiar position in modern culture. They are presented not as claims to be continually examined but almost as sacred historical events that sensible people are expected to accept.
Questioning them frequently results not in examination of the evidence but ridicule. That is not how science should operate. Science does not ask us to believe something because NASA says it happened, because television showed us pictures, or because generations of schoolchildren were taught that it happened.
My book Fake Moon Landings and the Lies of NASA examines the wider case, including NASA's photographic and video evidence, engineering questions, the loss of important records, techniques for simulating space imagery, and the broader historical context in which the Apollo programme developed.
Readers should examine the evidence and reach their own conclusions.
But one question remains remarkably simple:
If America really landed men on the Moon six times more than half a century ago, why is doing it again proving so difficult?
Mark Keenan is an independent writer and former Science Adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and former Environmental Affairs Officer at the United Nations. His work examines the intersections of science, history, technology, finance, religion and institutional power.