Categories: Space ExplorationSpace Flight

Tearing Apart Apollo 11 Inaccuracies

The movie trailer for Transformers 3 came out over a week ago, and seeing it is a facepalm moment for any true human spaceflight follower, fan, aficionado, or historian. I mean really, — and yes, I know this is a movie — but how could they portray what they call “a generation’s greatest achievement” so inaccurately? I originally decided I wasn’t going to post it, because it basically re-writes history and I can only imagine how the conspiracy theorists will run with this. Plus getting this kind of thing into the public mindset, I fear, will be another “Capricorn 1” moment where people construe the movie as proof that NASA is hiding things. But Robert Pearlman over at collectSPACE posted an article today, basically tearing apart the trailer, discussing every inaccuracy in detail. So watch the trailer, above, and then go check out Robert’s article — its great.

And then, while you’re at it, go read Robert Krulwich’s article on NPR’s website, where he gets a unusually lengthy response from Neil Armstrong about what really happened on the Apollo 11 moon walk, and why it was so short.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/