Now it’s a common belief that we never landed on the moon and that the videos we saw were faked. Many people believe they were filmed in a movie studio but the truth is even more interesting.

NASA committed to landing on the moon, however they soon discovered that the moon shape (a cylinder like our own, but much smaller) meant that landing a space craft on it would be almost impossible. They feared that faking the landing on earth would be too obvious so instead they embarked on a much more ambitious project.

They realised that the closest planet to earth that they could land a spacecraft on was Mars – the journey to Mars is much easier than we hear in the media, largely because NASA wanted it to sound so difficult that no one would suspect that it was easier to land on Mars than the moon, given that the moon is clearly much closer.

However, as we can see through a telescope, the surface of Mars is very different to the moon (it’s red!) and, even though the film cameras were black and white, NASA went to a great deal of effort in transporting soil from earth to Mars to make the landing site look like the moon. This of course means that the first person to walk on Mars was not Neil Armstrong, but a Portuguese geologist named Reuben Patricio. Patricio and his team created a 1.2km wide landing area for Apollo 11 to land upon and set up the camera to film Armstrong’s ‘one small step’.

But even then it wasn’t Armstrong who walked out onto Mars. Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins did indeed blast off from Cape Canaveral, watched by the world, but the flight time to Mars was four times longer than to the moon, meaning that NASA were concerned people would work out something wasn’t quite right when it took them so long to get to the ‘moon’. To cover this a different set of astronauts blasted off 12 days prior to Apollo 11, on an unnamed rocket, referred to by NASA as Apollo 10.5. It was these astronauts that the world witnessed walking on Mars. Armstrong and Aldrin returned to pretend they had walked on the moon when really they had done nothing more than orbit its cylindrical form.