Whenever someone likes to claim that the moon landing was faked — a fairly tedious conversation, even as conspiracy theories go — my general response is to ask, “OK, which one?” Most people seem to forget that there were six total crewed landings, all of them conducted by the U.S. government between 1969 and 1972. Aside from some robotic probes, no other country has put human beings on the massive rock that orbits our home planet.
Apollo 11 is the most famous of those, of course, but it almost seems that the main reason humans haven’t been back up there in 54 years is because we got bored, which is pretty remarkable in and of itself. We achieved something so mind-blowing that no other species could comprehend it, let alone accomplish it, something that truly speaks to rising above our animal nature, demonstrating the absolute limits that humanity can reach while opening the potential for even larger ambitions. Yet we kinda shrugged about the moon and moved on, at least until very recently. Was it really such a big deal to begin with?
