Astronauts

Does a meme on social media prove that footage of astronauts jumping on the surface of the moon must be fake because they come back down to approximately the same place? Wouldn't an astronaut who jumped up for one second come down many feet away from where he took off because the moon is rotating and has no atmosphere? No,…

Are solar flares not real, thus incapable of disrupting telecommunications networks, as a post on Instagram suggests? No, that's not true: Solar flares are well-documented bursts of electromagnetic energy emitted by the sun during geomagnetic storms, and a large body of evidence proves they exist and have far-ranging effects. Flares disrupt radar, gps and other radiowave-based systems, according to recognized…

Is it true that the Lunar Roving Vehicle could not have fit inside the Lunar Module on the Apollo 15 mission, meaning moon missions after that were faked, as a post on Instagram suggested? No, that's not true: The Apollo 15 mission was a 1971 space program that genuinely landed the Lunar Module on the moon with the Lunar Roving…

Was the Gemini 9 spacewalk in 1966 faked, as a 2024 post on social media implies with a video clip? No, that's not true: Video footage included in the post is from a 1966 televised re-enactment of what was happening in space on June 5 of that year. CBS News Correspondent Walter Cronkite said multiple times during the live broadcast…

Did NASA's Hubble Telescope take the Weekly World News' "Photo of Heaven" as part of hundreds of photos beamed back from space to the Goddard Space Flight Center in December 1993? No, that's not true: NASA told Lead Stories that it is "not a real Hubble image," but artwork. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, has provided stunning images…

Is the International Space Station (ISS) in a swimming pool? No, that's not true: The ISS is in space, orbiting Earth, contrary to images on social media referring to the ISS as "International Swimming Station". The images show NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory with a full-size mock-up of the space station. It includes a large pool with technology used for training…

Does this video show a real asteroid crashing into the moon, prompting an explosion following the collision? No, that's not true: Lead Stories determined through a reverse image search that the footage in question was first posted by a YouTube creator in February 2023 and was later shared by an account on Instagram that confirmed the clip was created using…

Does NASA translated from Hebrew mean "to deceive" in English? No, that's not true: NASA is an English-language acronym that stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In Hebrew, there is a word that is pronounced like "nasa," but it means to lift, to carry, and to bear. A University of Washington professor of Jewish literature, whose research focuses…

Does a rail gun's ability to "hit a target 100 miles away in a perfectly straight line" prove that the Earth is "missing curvature"? No, that's not true: Such claims are "absurd" and "completely nuts," two physicists told Lead Stories. That's because rail guns fire projectiles that are subject to the same laws of gravity as all other objects on…

Did NASA and the crew of the International Space Station (ISS) stage a live stream video pretending to be in zero gravity on board the ISS, and was this hoax betrayed by a blooper where a ball printed like a globe fell to the floor as if under the force of Earth's gravity? No, that's not true: This video shows…