By Rich McKay
(Reuters) -In a testament to Kim Kardashian's power to grab the spotlight, the head of NASA felt compelled this week to set the record straight when the reality TV queen said she believed a well-worn conspiracy theory that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was a fake.
In a new episode of Hulu's long-running family saga "The Kardashians," the show's star said she thinks the lunar landing by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was a fiction.
What convinced her, she said during the segment,
was a video she saw online of an Aldrin interview. She said she interpreted his comments in that interview to mean the moon landing never occurred.
Since the 1970s, skeptics have floated the notion that the mission - viewed live by tens of millions of people around the world - was actually staged.
That theory has waxed and waned over the years, but Sean Duffy, U.S. Transportation Secretary and NASA's acting administrator, wasted no time in shooting it down after Kardashian told her 4 million viewers that she was embracing the idea.
"Yes, @KimKardashian, we've been to the Moon before ... 6 times!" Duffy wrote on Thursday on the X social media platform.
In fact, he said, the U.S. was going back to the moon under the leadership of President Donald Trump. In 2026, the Artemis II mission is scheduled to send astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon, ahead of a planned moon landing in 2027.
"We won the last space race and we will win this one too," Duffy wrote.
Kardashian referenced a video in which Aldrin, now 95, was asked what was the "scariest moment" during the Apollo mission. Reading from her phone, Kardashian quoted Aldrin as saying: "There was no scary moment, because it didn't happen."
The reality star then said: "So I think it didn't happen."
Aldrin's remarks appear to have been taken out of context from a 2015 onstage appearance at Britain's Oxford Union debating society.
During the event, Aldrin was asked by someone in the audience, "What was the scariest moment of the journey?"
He hesitated and said, "The scariest?" throwing up his hands as if to dismiss the notion. "It didn't happen. It could have been scary," he said, suggesting that nothing frightening happened.
Then someone in the audience asked him about a faulty circuit breaker, and he proceeded to describe a technical problem that arose during the mission.
A spokesperson for NASA could not immediately be reached to elaborate on the story. A spokesperson for Kardashian did not immediately respond. A spokesperson for Aldrin was not immediately available.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Frank McGurty and Rosalba O'Brien)
