Exaggeration and Propaganda

The return of man to the Moon -figuratively speaking, since the astronauts only orbited the satellite- has filled hours and hours of television. It makes sense: the images of the celestial body and of Earth seen from the Moon and from the Orion capsule are spectacular, and it had been over half a century since any human had traveled so far from our planet. However, some of the headlines presented by the networks were not true. No, it is not the first time humanity has glimpsed the far side of the Moon.

In 1959, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 3 sent the first photographs taken from the hidden hemisphere of the satellite. It would take another 9 years for three humans to be able to see with their own eyes the hidden face of the celestial body. The lucky ones were Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, who in 1968 aboard Apollo 8, successfully completed ten orbits around the Moon before returning home. They were followed by another 21 NASA astronauts on the Apollo missions 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. Moreover, as in all those missions, except for the 13th which had to be aborted, they orbited the satellite, allowing its crew to observe both hemispheres for a longer period.

However, it is true that the crew, which includes three NASA astronauts (commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch) and another from the Canadian Space Agency (Jeremy Hansen), indeed had a more comprehensive perspective by flying over the Moon at about 6,500 kilometers altitude compared to approximately 200 kilometers of the Apollo missions.

It is great that the U.S. has sent astronauts back to the Moon, but there is also a lot of propaganda, and some media have not been able to filter it out.