Why a Russian Official Called for a Moon Landing Probe in 2015

A Russian Official’s 2015 Call to Investigate the Moon Landings

In June 2015, Vladimir Markin, then the spokesman for Russia's Investigative Committee, used a newspaper column to suggest an international inquiry into the American Moon landings of 1969 to 1972. Headlines quickly turned this into "Russia doesn't believe the US went to the Moon". That was not what he wrote, and it was never an official Russian position.

Markin's real targets were two loose ends that moon-hoax believers love to cite: the "lost" original Apollo 11 footage and the whereabouts of the lunar rocks. Both have ordinary, well-documented answers. Below is what he actually proposed, why he wrote it, and what the record shows about the tapes, the samples and the landings themselves.

What Markin actually proposed

The column appeared in the Russian daily Izvestia, and The Moscow Times reported it on 16 June 2015. Markin called some details of the Apollo programme "murky" and said an international investigation could clear up two questions: what happened to film of the first landing, and where the lunar rock collected on the missions had gone.

He was careful to stop short of a hoax claim. In his words: "We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon] and simply made a film about it." He framed the tapes and rocks as part of humanity's shared heritage, and their supposed loss as a loss for everyone.

So the accurate version of the story is narrower than the viral one. One senior official, writing an opinion piece, asked for an audit of artefacts. He did not deny that astronauts walked on the Moon, and the Russian government did not launch any inquiry.

RIA Novosti / Alexander Natruskin

The FIFA row behind the column

The timing tells you a lot. Weeks earlier, US prosecutors had charged FIFA officials in a sweeping corruption case. The scandal helped push Sepp Blatter to announce his resignation as FIFA president on 2 June 2015, and it raised awkward questions about Russia's role as host of the 2018 World Cup.

Markin's column was mainly a protest against that American case. He objected to US prosecutors casting themselves as "the supreme arbiters of international football affairs", and argued that if Washington could investigate others, international investigators could look into America's past too. Gizmodo noted that he also listed the 1994 World Cup, held in the US, and alleged war crimes in eastern Ukraine as topics worth probing.

Read that way, the Moon was a rhetorical jab in a diplomatic argument about football, not a scientific challenge. It echoed the old Space Race rivalry: the Soviet Union put the first satellite and the first person into orbit, while the United States won the race to land people on the Moon.

The "missing" Apollo 11 tapes, explained

The footage question is real, but it is much smaller than it sounds. The television pictures of the first moonwalk were never lost. Millions watched them live, and broadcast-quality copies survived in several archives.

What went missing were the backup telemetry tapes. The camera on the Moon sent a slow-scan signal that had to be converted for ordinary TV, and the conversion was crude: in effect, a TV camera filmed a monitor. The raw signal was also recorded on one-inch data tapes, which could in principle have produced sharper pictures with modern processing.

When the story broke in 2006, NASA began an official search. In July 2009 the team, made up mostly of retired engineers, concluded that the tapes had been shipped from Australia to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and then erased and reused in the early 1980s, when the agency was short of data tapes for the Landsat satellite programme. Erasing old tapes was standard procedure at the time.

The search did turn up the best surviving copies: a videotape recorded in Sydney, CBS News archive footage and kinescope films at Johnson Space Center. Lowry Digital restored them, NASA showed the first clips on 16 July 2009, and the full restoration of about three hours was finished that December. Embarrassing, yes; evidence of fakery, no.

Where the Moon rocks really are

The rocks are not missing either. The six crewed Apollo landings brought back about 381 kilograms of lunar material, now catalogued as more than 110,000 individual samples. Most of it is kept at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston, largely under dry nitrogen, with a smaller backup collection at White Sands in New Mexico. Scientists around the world still borrow samples for research.

There is one grain of truth that hoax stories stretch. In 1973 President Nixon had fragments of an Apollo 17 rock mounted on plaques and given to all 50 US states and 135 foreign heads of state. Many of these "goodwill" displays have since been lost or stolen. That is a story about poor record-keeping by recipients, not about the main collection.

It is worth adding that Soviet scientists had their own lunar samples to compare. Three robotic Luna probes returned a combined 301 grams of Moon soil between 1970 and 1976, giving them an independent reference point for what lunar material looks like.

How we know the landings happened

Independent evidence for Apollo is plentiful, and much of it does not depend on trusting NASA:

Photos from orbit. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 sites from 2009, showing the descent stages left behind. Japan's SELENE orbiter detected the disturbed "halo" around the Apollo 15 landing site.
Mirrors on the surface. Laser reflectors placed by astronauts have been hit from Earth since August 1969 by observatories such as Lick and McDonald.
Live tracking by others, including the Soviet Union, which followed the missions as they flew and had every reason to expose a fake.

Popular "clues" also fall apart. The flag seems to wave because it was stored folded and its pole was twisted into the ground; with no air to damp the motion, the fabric kept swinging briefly, then hung still once the astronauts let go. The idea that Stanley Kubrick staged the footage, or confessed in The Shining, has no supporting evidence at all.

Moon-landing doubt in Russia, then and since

Scepticism about Apollo is more common in Russia than in the US. A Russian poll in 2000 found 28 per cent believed the landings were faked, compared with about 6 per cent of Americans in Gallup's 1999 survey. Markin's column played to that audience, even as he disclaimed the hoax theory.

The theme returned in November 2018, when Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin was asked about it at an event. Smirking, he answered: "We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not." The Associated Press reported it as a joke, but it showed how easily the topic still lands in Russian public life.

If you meet the claim that "Russia wants to investigate the Moon landings", the honest summary is this: a single official raised it during a football dispute, he explicitly said he was not calling the landings fake, and both of his "mysteries" were answered by NASA's own published findings years earlier.

Sources: The Moscow Times, 16 June 2015; Gizmodo, 17 June 2015; Fox News/AP on Rogozin, November 2018; Apollo 11 missing tapes (Wikipedia); Moon rock (Wikipedia); Moon landing conspiracy theories (Wikipedia). The story was first shared here via Unilad. Photo credit as shown: RIA Novosti / Alexander Natruskin.

Related: