The acting administrator of NASA, Sean Duffy, reaffirmed on Thursday that the 1969 landing of U.S. astronauts on the moon did, in fact, take place.
Mr. Duffy felt compelled to set the record straight after Kim Kardashian said on her reality show, “The Kardashians,” that she thought the moon landing had been faked. The episode was posted to Hulu on Thursday.
Hours after the episode was released, Mr. Duffy addressed Ms. Kardashian in a post on X. “Yes, we’ve been to the Moon before,” he wrote. “6 times!”
In the scene on the show, Ms. Kardashian is scrolling through her smartphone while talking to her co-star Sarah Paulson. Ms. Kardashian begins reading aloud from an article that claimed to ask Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon after Neil Armstrong, what the scariest moment of the mission was.
“There was no scary moment because it didn’t happen,” Ms. Kardashian quotes Mr. Aldrin as saying. “It could’ve been scary, but it wasn’t because it didn’t happen.”
She adds as an aside, “I center conspiracies all the time.”
She does not say who published the article, but tells Ms. Paulson she will send “a million” of them to her.
Ms. Paulson then says that she is “going to go on a serious deep dive.”
For the record: Mr. Aldrin has never denied the 1969 moon landing by the Apollo 11 spacecraft. One of the most famous photographs of the last century shows Mr. Aldrin on the moon, a shot snapped by Mr. Armstrong.
Ms. Kardashian goes on. “I think it was fake,” she says to Ms. Paulson on the show. “I’ve seen a few videos on Buzz Aldrin talking about how it didn’t happen. He says it all the time now, in interviews. Maybe we should find Buzz Aldrin.”
Mr. Aldrin, 95, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Duffy said in his post on X that the United States was in a strong position to return to the moon. In early 2026, NASA plans to send astronauts on the Artemis II mission on a 10-day trip that will swing around the moon before returning to Earth. The astronauts will not land on the lunar surface, but will be the closest anyone has been to the moon in more than half a century.
“We won the last space race and we will win this one too!” Mr. Duffy said.
Mr. Duffy, who was a reality TV star himself on “The Real World” and “Road Rules” on MTV in the 1990s, went on to invite Ms. Kardashian to the Artemis launch at the Kennedy Space Center. She did not immediately say if she would attend.
Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.
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