A Russian space enthusiast is asking for 800,000 rubles ($12,100) to fund the building of a spacecraft to prove that the Apollo moon landing really happened and settle the question for conspiracy theorists once and for all.
"What do you think, have people been to the moon or not? Many of you have probably had endless discussions on the topic," a description of the project on the Boomstarter.ru crowdfunding platform said.
"But whatever the arguments, in the end we have to admit that almost all evidence of people flying to the moon has been provided by U.S. space agency NASA and these facts cannot be double-checked," it said.
The brain behind the initiative, Vitaly Yegorov, proposes to build a satellite to go into lunar orbit and take high resolution photographs of the moon's surface to document evidence of the landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, as well as the Luna and Lunokhod Soviet-era space missions.
The Boomstarter page included a list of engineers and scientists who had signed up to the project.
On Thursday, the platform had raised 119,527 rubles ($1,800) from 98 sponsors.
The Apollo 11 became the first manned spacecraft to land on the moon on July 20, 1969, winning a years-long race to the moon for the U.S. against the Soviet Union.
Or did it?
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