About 250 miles (400 kilometers) up in the blisteringly hot thermosphere, Russian cosmonauts are drinking espresso and looking down at our watery blue planet from the International Space Station (ISS). At NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) facilities around the United States, scientists and engineers are busily making complicated components for a crewed mission to Mars. And in Japan, a construction company says that by the year 2050, it will complete a space elevator that will travel up a cable from the Earth's surface to a height of almost 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers).
Conquering the cosmos? Yeah, we've got this. Only, here on Earth, some folks think we never even set foot on the Moon.
That Never Happened
"No-moony" conspiracy theorists believe that the Apollo 11 mission was a giant NASA hoax. Apollo 11's rocket, Saturn V. launched from Cape Kennedy in Florida on July 16, 1969, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin arrived, via a lunar module called the Eagle, on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility. These two Americans became the first people ever to walk on our planet's only natural satellite. Except, no-moonies insist it never happened. They claim that the Apollo 11 mission, over-budget and plagued by technical problems, was scrapped at the last second and filmed in a movie studio in Nevada. They say they have the facts to prove it.
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A lot has happened for modern humans to get to this point. We lost most of our hair, learned how to make tools, established civilizations, sent a person to the Moon, and invented artificial intelligence. Whew! With all of these changes, our bodies have changed, too. It’s only taken us about six million years.
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