1. Prologue: The Conspiracy of the Faked Moon Landings

A couple of years ago, many friends of mine asked whether I actually believed in the American Moon landings of the 60s and 70s. I was not the least bit surprised about this question. When I was a child, I unsurprisingly paid close attention to the Moon landings and earnestly painted rockets in school. We kids knew the names of our heroes by heart and fought over the question of who would be the best astronaut. For some reason I thought Jim Lovell from Apollo 8 was particularly good, but Frank Borman also wasn’t bad. My most envied possession was my Apollo-Quartet collectible card game, and to feed my enthusiasm, my grandmother sent me a picture book about the path to the Moon landings that I absolutely adored. The Moon landings are a part of my childhood and they were the grounds for my passion about space, as well as for my technical and scientific interests. Lastly, these missions were the foundations as to why I would become an astronomer and why I currently work in aerospace engineering management. And now here comes this question!