Claim:
In late 2025, NASA admitted that it “didn’t go to the moon.”
Rating:
In December 2025, a post on X (archived) claimed that “NASA just dropped the mother of all bombshells” and admitted “we didn’t go to the moon.” For years, some people have insisted that the 1969 moon landing was staged and that U.S. astronauts never actually made it to the moon.
Attached to the post was a 12-minute video about the purported admission. A Facebook post (archived) linked to an article that was largely just a transcript of the video.
Snopes readers emailed us asking whether the claim was true.
The claim was false. Snopes could not find any evidence of NASA recently admitting that it never went to the moon, although there were recent instances of NASA confirming the 1969 moon landing was real.
Neither the video in the X post nor the article linked on Facebook included any evidence that NASA admitted it never went to the moon. Neither cited when or where this purported admission was made. Neither included any clips, links, screenshots or quotes of NASA dropping “the mother of all bombshells.”
Snopes first checked the two images in the video’s thumbnail as it appeared in the article to see whether either was related to such an admission.
The larger of the images was from a 2013 NASA news conference on the completion of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative. The moon was mentioned only twice during the news conference. The first time, Alan Lindenmoyer, then the manager of NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, referenced “new technologies that are required to explore outside of Earth’s boundaries … to the moon and beyond.” Two minutes later, Lindenmoyer referenced systems “to go back and explore the moon.”
The smaller image appeared to originate from a 2008 print advertisement for the Swedish National Debt Office and had no connection to NASA.
Because both of those images were more than a decade old and neither was related to NASA allegedly admitting it never went to the moon, Snopes attempted to look for a more recent event the video could have been referring to.
The best Snopes could find was a Sept. 24, 2025, news conference held by NASA’s Artemis II crew. The Artemis missions intend to put the first humans on the moon since the Apollo missions. NASA expects Artemis II, which will orbit around the moon, to launch no later than April 2026.
During that news conference, Reid Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, said, “This is the first time we’re going to send humans to the moon and [have] humans in low-Earth orbit.”
Although the first part of that sentence may have sounded like an admission that NASA had never previously sent anyone to the moon, the rest of the sentence made clear Wiseman meant that Artemis would be the first time humans would go to the moon at the same time as humans were in low-Earth orbit. The International Space Station, which is regularly home to astronauts from the U.S. and other countries simultaneously, flies above the planet in low-Earth orbit. Astronauts have been visiting the ISS since November 2000, long after the last moon landing in 1972.
The ISS even picked out Wiseman’s quote on social media (archived) that same day to announce that the crew in the space station will have a ship-to-ship call with the astronauts on the Artemis II spaceship while it is on the way to the moon.
Since that news conference, NASA has publicly stated it has been to the moon. On Oct. 30, Sean Duffy, the acting NASA administrator, posted to X (archived) that “we’ve been to the Moon before… 6 times!” His post was directed toward Kim Kardashian after she talked about believing the moon landing was faked on her Hulu show, the clip of which Duffy included in his post.
The video and article claiming NASA dropped a bombshell were the products of The People’s Voice, a rebranded version of an older website called News Punch, which was well-known for producing misinformation. Snopes has previously fact-checked other misinformation spread by The People’s Voice.
For further reading, Snopes has previously fact-checked a number of claims regarding “evidence” that the moon landing was faked.
