ITo mark the 55th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission on July 20, Hollywood is hoping a new film about NASA staging a fake moon landing will be a big hit.
In Fly me to the moon, In theaters July 12, a Nixon White House aide (Woody Harrelson) sends New York ad executive Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to oversee a mock-up of the first moonwalk on a sound stage, in case the real thing doesn’t pan out. The idea is that the United States, then in the midst of its Cold War with the Soviet Union, can’t afford to fail. Wanting the American people to see a victory, the White House is racing full speed ahead to become the first country to put a man on the moon, more than a decade after the communist nation put the first artificial satellite into orbit in 1957.
People leaving the theater after Fly me to the moon There are two questions: Was a PR guru really hired to “sell” the moon to the American people? And did the U.S. government really stage a fake moonwalk in case the real Apollo 11 mission didn’t go as planned? Here’s the real history that inspired the movie.
The real PR for the moon landing
To be clear, the government did not hire a PR expert to oversee the filming of a fake moon landing, in case the mission failed.
“There was no special effort to ‘sell’ the Apollo program, much less directly or indirectly raise money for the agency,” Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian from 2010 to 2020, who served as an advisor on the script, tells TIME.
Of the approximately 400,000 people who worked on the lunar mission, about three-quarters of them worked for private contractors, who provided services that they were allowed to market, said Richard Jurek, co-author of Marketing the Moon: Selling the Apollo Moon Program.
“They were the ones who put together NASA press kits and ran advertising campaigns,” Jurek tells TIME. “They had to get permission from NASA to do it, but they did it themselves.” [advertising] campaigns.”
It’s true that the astronauts wore Omega watches because the devices withstood all sorts of tests in different weather conditions. In the film, Jones approaches companies like Omega to set up marketing campaigns, but that’s not how it would have happened. The film also suggests that money from sponsorship deals helped pay for the Apollo 11 mission, but that didn’t really happen either, according to Jurek.
NASA’s website states that “as a government agency, NASA will not promote or endorse or give the appearance of promoting or endorsing a commercial product, service, or activity.” So sponsorship was absolutely not part of the Apollo 11 PR campaign, Barry notes. Some astronauts did endorse products, but only after they were no longer on NASA’s payroll.
“Among the NASA people I talked to about the script, this was the thing that got the biggest laugh,” Barry says. “In dealing with the public in any form, I was reminded frequently by our legal people that even the semblance of an endorsement for a commercial product would get me in big trouble.”
The real head of NASA’s public affairs department during the lead-up to the Apollo 11 moon landing was a journalist named Julian Scheer. He oversaw a team of ex-journalists who helped the news media cover the space program and profile its staff and astronauts. Scheer was the one who insisted that the first steps on the moon be televised live. Unlike the Soviets, who didn’t let journalists have a say in the inner workings of the space program, NASA allowed its staff and astronauts to speak freely.
During the lead-up to the moon landing, NASA’s PR gurus were mostly concerned with what NASA would tell the world if the astronauts died on the mission, so they prepared numerous statements that were never used. After the Apollo 11 astronauts returned safely to the moon, NASA’s PR efforts turned to convincing the public that the space program still needed to go back to the moon and explore other planets. As Jurek puts it, “Most people think of NASA as an organization that exists solely to get astronauts to the moon. So once we did that, we thought, ‘OK, what’s next?'”
The Origin of the Moon Landing Theory
When it comes to the idea of a staged moonwalk being filmed, the answer is a bit clearer. For most, anyway.
“There is no evidence that NASA ever faked a moon walk,” Barry says.
It is true that there was a space race between the US and the Soviet Union. American leaders feared that if the Soviets were to reach the moon first, the communist government would be seen as the superior form of government compared to the US democracy. However, there is nothing to suggest that the US was so desperate in its mission that it considered faking a moon landing for the American public.
Yet conspiracy theories persist today, with some questioning the success of the Apollo 11 mission with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin. There are those who mistakenly believe that NASA faked the first moon walk. Barry points out that if the U.S. had faked the moon landing, the Soviet government would be all over it. In fact, Soviet scientists never questioned the legitimacy of the feat. The U.S. also worked with countries around the world to communicate with the Apollo spacecraft.
That said, despite all the physical rock samples brought back from the moon and analyzed by a consortium of highly respected scientists, a small minority of Americans still think that NASA had no way of having the budget or time to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A 2021 University of New Hampshire poll found that 10% of Americans believe NASA has not landed on the moon.
“There was only one week in the 1960s when everyone was in favor of spending more money on the space program: more than 50 percent of Americans. That was the week we landed on the moon,” Barry says.
According to Peter Knight, author of Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to ‘The X-Files’,“the conspiracy theory that the moon landing was a hoax can be traced to a self-published book from 1976 We Never Went to the Moon: America’s $30 Billion Scam by Bill Kaysing, a former U.S. Navy officer. The basic premise is that NASA couldn’t meet JFK’s deadline, so they sent astronauts into orbit and staged a moonwalk at a movie studio. To some, it seemed that Kaysing’s military credentials had a kind of insider knowledge.
The book also fit the culture of the time. The 1970s marked the beginning of years of declining trust in the American government, between the failed Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals. Conspiracy theories about the sudden assassination of JFK in 1963 had been circulating for years.
“A lot of people felt like the government had lied,” Knight tells TIME. “That’s the context in which Kaysing’s book comes out.”
The 1978 fictional film Capricorn Oneabout NASA staging a fake landing on Mars only fanned the flames. And then Kaysing’s ideas became popular in the 1980s among “flat-Earthers,” conspiracy theorists who falsely believe the Earth is flat. Over the years, his false theory spread via talk radio, zines, books, and gun shows in the age of social media.
Moon landing hoax conspiracy theories may be more widespread among Russian citizens than among American citizens. A 2020 poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center found that half of Russians believed the 1969 moon landing never happened. Knight offers an explanation for why the moon landing hoax conspiracy theory persists among some Americans: “A lot of people thought, if we can’t solve our problems at home, what do we do with some kind of fantasy idea of space exploration? So I think the conspiracy theories address some of those concerns.”
When asked if a film featuring a staged moon landing might make people wonder if the whole moon landing was a hoax, Barry says he thinks anyone who sees the film will immediately see that it is not a documentary, but an obvious parody of conspiracy theorists and a romantic comedy. And for the skeptics: there is plenty of evidence online that “we landed on the moon, not once, but six times.”
Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.