Neil DeGrasse Tyson clarified a conspiracy theory regarding NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. According to Tyson, claims about the Moon landing being fake are absurd.

Following the success of Apollo 11, which was NASA’s first human mission that landed on the Moon, the space agency has been plagued by detractors who claim that the lunar landing never really happened.

One of the most common arguments the critics use is the Apollo 11 spacecraft’s lack of fuel. According to them, the Saturn V rocket that carried the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins didn’t have enough fuel for a trip to the Moon and back.

Recently, Tyson tackled this subject in the documentary “Neil DeGrasse Tyson Explains Everything.” Using simple calculations, he confirmed that the Apollo 11 mission really reached the Moon.

“You can look at the Saturn V rocket that took off – we have good video footage of that from multiple angles,” he said in the documentary. “And you can look at how much fuel is in the rocket in all three stages, allowing you to calculate what’s called a rocket equation of how far will the fuel get the payload of the rocket.”

“What’s in the payload?” Tyson added. “The astronauts and their little lunar lander. It’s enough fuel to go to the Moon and come back, it’s enough fuel to do that.”

Tyson then went on to say that even though scientists like him can easily explain the technical aspects of Apollo 11, supporters of the Moon landing hoax will always ask for concrete evidence regarding the mission, such as photos of the lunar surface.

However, once they are presented with these kinds of photos, they will most likely simply dismiss them as fake.

For Tyson, this shows that the detractors have no intention of believing that NASA was able to send and land astronauts on the Moon.

“All the people who didn’t want to believe we went to the Moon, they had to wait until we had orbiters around the Moon and pictures of the landing site,” he said. “But the people who genuinely don’t want to believe we went to the Moon said: ‘Oh, those are fake.’”

“So what it means is they already have the answer they want,” he added. “The answer they want is that we didn’t go to the Moon and nothing we will present to them will matter.”

apollo 11 aldrin land
This photo, taken by Neil Armstrong, shows Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin descending the lunar module stairs to step foot on the Moon. NASA