Russia space agency to ‘verify’ US moon landings on upcoming mission

Washington, Nov 25: The head of Russia's national space agency has proposed a mission to the moon to verify whether the American moon landings really took place.

Dmitry Rogozin was responding to a question about whether or not NASA actually landed on the moon nearly 50 years ago. He appeared to be joking, as he smirked and shrugged while answering. But conspiracies surrounding NASA's moon missions are common in Russia.

In a video of their interaction, posted to his 815,000 Twitter followers, Mr Rogozin says: "We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not".

Nasa's six well-documented official manned missions to the surface of the Moon, beginning with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in July 1969 and continuing with Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt in December 1972, have been dogged with conspiracy theories.

Earlier in November, Rogozin revealed plans to start building a base on the moon after 2025, with the project exceeding the US Apollo programme of the 1960s and 1970s in terms of scale. The programme will put its first humans on the moon by 2030 or 2031.