Does a photo show that a bald eagle landed on top of the Artemis II rocket on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026, just before liftoff? No, that's not true: The bird is an AI creation, about three times larger than a real bald eagle. Online AI image detection tools also found it to be 100% and 88% likely to be AI-generated.
The claim appeared in a post article (archived here) by the christine_evans_10 account on Threads on April 2, 2026. It read:
Incredible!!
A Bald Eagle landed on top of the Artemis II rocket on the launch pad just before Liftoff that was not far away.
An absolutely rare moment where nature meets mankind's push to return to space.
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by christine_evans_10 on Threads.)
The faux eagle shown perched upon the crew capsule at the top of Artemis II is huge, at least three times larger than a bald eagle in real life. According to NASA (archived here), the capsule, the portion above the NASA logo, is 11 feet tall and 16 feet across. The National Wildlife Federation (archived here) says bald eagles grow to be 2.5 to 3 feet in height. The image shows the eagle roughly as tall as the capsule:
In reality, there wouldn't have been any place for the eagle to land. An approximately 50-foot-tall structure called the Launch Abort System sits on top of the capsule. You can see it (circled in red) in this NASA photo (archived here) from March 20, 2026:
(Image source: NASA/Joel Kowsky.)
Looking at the NASA photo also shows that the AI image has different proportions than the real Artemis II rocket.
Lead Stories ran the image through the Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool. It concluded the image was 100% "likely to be AI-generated":
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Lead Stories also analyzed the image using Sightengine, another AI detection tool. It found it was 88% "likely AI-generated":
(Image source: Sightengine.)
