page_title: Moon landing conspiracy theories
section_title: Missing data
hierarchical_section_title: Moon landing conspiracy theories / Claims / Missing data
caption_attribution_description: English: Lunar Module of the Apollo 16 mission
context_page_description: The moon landing conspiracy theories are beliefs that men did not land on the Moon in 1969–1972 during the Apollo program and that NASA faked the information. Some conspiracy theorists believe the Skylab space station is also a hoax.
  This belief is considered by the scientific community and historians to be irrational. But on the internet, the debate can occur since it is easy for anyone to publish their ideas. There are subcultures within the USA and cultures around the world that believe that the Moon landings were faked. This view is claimed to have been taught in Cuban schools and wherever else Cuban teachers are sent. It is also shared by the Taliban and by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
context_section_description: Blueprints and drawings of the machines used in the Apollo project are missing. Some Apollo 11 tapes containing telemetry and high quality video of the first moonwalk are also missing. Moon landing conspiracy theorists believe that this is because they never existed, since the mission was faked.
  Dr. David Williams (NASA archivist at Goddard Space Flight Center) and Apollo 11 flight director Eugene F. Kranz acknowledged that some of the Apollo 11 tapes are missing. When the recordings were sent back to Earth to be shown on TV, they were converted to a different format which was lower quality. Now the lower quality tapes are available, but the original high quality videos received in Australia are missing. Some pictures of the original high quality image are still available, and videos have been released from other missions too, like the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package.
  Some people at NASA are looking for the tapes to help them plan for future missions. They believe the Apollo 11 tapes were sent for storage at the U.S. National Archives in 1970, but by 1984 all the Apollo 11 tapes had been returned to the Goddard Space Flight Center. The tapes may have been stored rather than re-used, and efforts to determine where they were stored are ongoing. Goddard was storing 35,000 new tapes per year in 1967, even before the lunar landings.
  On November 1, 2006 Cosmos Magazine reported that 100 data tapes recorded in Australia during the Apollo 11 mission had been found in the basement of the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. One of the old tapes was sent to NASA for analysis.
  On July 16, 2009, NASA said that it must have erased the original Apollo 11 Moon footage years ago so that it could reuse the tape. On December 22, 2009 NASA issued a final report on the tapes.  Senior engineer Dick Nafzger concluded that approximately 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. For the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, Lowry Digital of Burbank, California restored the low quality videos. Some pieces of the restored footage are available on the NASA website.
caption: Apollo 16 Lunar Module
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