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Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, recently claimed the NASA moon landings in 1969 were fake.
In his time as head of Roscosmos, Rogozin also repeatedly threatened to pull Russia out of the International Space Station and claimed that Venus “is a Russian planet,” so his track record is a more than a little spotty.
Now he claims on Telegram that he asked for official proof of NASA moon landings in the late 1960 and 1970s when he was deputy prime minister of Russia.
Rogozin says the only response he got was to be given a copy of a book by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.
Later, after being appointed director general at Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos in 2018, he says he asked again.
“Yes, I did not undermine or aggravate anything, but only by virtue of my nature I tried to get to the bottom of the details and establish, at least for myself, the true state of affairs in the issue of exploration of the Moon by our competitors,” he wrote.
“It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the ’60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?”
The response to his questioning the American moon landings that time was anger with him trying to undermine Russia’s “sacred cooperation with NASA.”
“I also received one angry call from a high-ranking official accusing me of ‘aggravating the international situation’ with my doubts,” he claimed.
Ars Technica reports…
Accordingly, at the end of this “investigation,” Rogozin said he does not believe Americans landed on the moon but rather that they had succeeded in infiltrating the “establishment” of the Russian space program.
Rogozin’s doubts about the Apollo Program did not surface publicly during his years at Roscosmos, but there were plenty of other reasons that NASA and other international partners found his leadership style insufferable. He mocked US astronauts, repeatedly threatened to pull Russia out of the space station partnership, and attempted to use the international facility for propaganda purposes. NASA was therefore thrilled to see Rogozin go when he was effectively fired in July 2022.
Interestingly, while Apollo 11 was actually on the moon, the Soviet Union’s Luna 15 spacecraft was in orbit around the moon.
Luna 15 was supposed to collect lunar soil samples and return before NASA could get Apollo 11 back to Earth.
Instead, Luna 15 crashed into the moon a few hours before the Apollo 11 crew left the moon and returned home.