Conspiracy theorists often claim, with fake statistical rigor, that it is mathematically impossible for six landings out of seven to have gone perfectly, without any kind of accident. They argue that nature is always on the side of entropy and that, applying Murphy's Law, if a complex space mission does not end in disaster, then it cannot be considered real. It is a fallacious argument resting on a completely distorted historical account. In reality, carefully ignored or kept quiet by denialist literature, the Apollo program was an obstacle course full of countless technical problems, some of which brought the crew within a hair's breadth of annihilation, constantly changing the course and length of the missions.

The toll in human lives, tragically, was paid right from the start. The Apollo 1 mission, which conspiracy theorists like to describe as the beginning of the alleged staged hoax, actually ended in tragedy before it even left the ground. On January 27, 1967, during a routine test on the launch pad simulating the countdown, a short circuit inside the capsule, filled with pure oxygen above atmospheric pressure, set off a flash fire that in just 17 seconds destroyed everything. The three astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died of asphyxiation and burns within seconds, trapped by a hatch that only opened inward. This disaster, the product of hurried design driven by the obsession with beating the Soviets, forced NASA to stop for almost two years. Contrary to those who believe the cover-up started here, it was precisely by listening to the fierce criticism of the surviving astronauts that the engineers redesigned the entire capsule, making it fireproof and giving it a quick-opening, outward-swinging hatch. It was only thanks to this meticulous redesign that the next mission, Apollo 7, the first test in Earth orbit, went ahead without lethal technical problems.

During the Apollo 4 , Apollo 5, Apollo 6 and Apollo 7 missions, NASA carried out intensive tests, with and without a crew, to validate the gigantic Saturn V launch vehicle, the heat shield and the life support systems. In this regard, we must recall the near-disaster of Apollo 6, an uncrewed mission in which the Saturn V rocket suffered frightening structural damage because of extremely violent "pogo" oscillations (dangerous structural resonances), even losing large panels of the outer fairing in flight. In addition, two of the J-2 engines of the second stage shut down prematurely because of ruptured lines, and the third stage failed to restart altogether. A failure like that with humans on board would have meant an immediate abort or death.

The next mission, Apollo 8 , was a risky gamble, a brutal acceleration of the program ordered by the American government to beat Soviet intelligence to the punch. Since the Lunar Module was running seriously late at the Grumman plants, NASA decided to send Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders to the Moon aboard the Command and Service Module alone at Christmas 1968. It was the first crewed flight of the colossal Saturn V, which, far from being perfect, showed dangerous pogo oscillations (violent longitudinal vibrations) that put the rocket's structure to a severe test, although they did not compromise the translunar injection or the triumphant return to Earth.

The Apollo 9 mission finally tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, validating the extremely delicate maneuvers of extraction, separation and reunion (rendezvous and docking). Although technically successful, the mission was marred by the poor physical condition of the Lunar Module Pilot, Rusty Schweickart, who suffered bouts of vomiting caused by space adaptation syndrome, forcing Mission Control to cancel and reschedule much of the planned extravehicular activity so as not to jeopardize the astronaut's safety inside his pressure suit.

But it was with Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for the landing, that disaster was narrowly avoided. Just 15 kilometers above the lunar surface, Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan were supposed to simulate an aborted descent, jettisoning the lower stage of the Lunar Module to rejoin the Command Module piloted by John Young. Because of an incorrect guidance switch configuration in the checklist, the onboard computer got confused, desperately trying to point the radar at the command module above and triggering a wild spin of the vehicle. The Lunar Module began tumbling out of control, at risk of plunging toward the Moon; it was only Stafford's composure, as he switched off the computer just in time and took manual control, that saved the crew from crashing.

Not even Apollo 11, the most famous mission in history, was free of problems that brought Mission Control to the verge of a nervous breakdown. During the final descent, the onboard computer suffered a data overload because a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position, triggering repeated alarms such as "1202" and "1201" that threatened to abort the landing. Right afterward, Neil Armstrong realized that the computer was taking them straight toward West crater, an area strewn with boulders the size of cars. He had to take partial manual control, flying horizontally to clear the crater, and touched down in the Sea of Tranquility when Mission Control estimated that only about twenty seconds remained before the fuel limit beyond which the landing would have had to be aborted by the rules (later analysis showed the real margin was about 45 seconds: propellant sloshing in the tanks had skewed the readings). On the surface, the ground proved so compacted that the two astronauts struggled desperately, live to the world, to plant the flag and the experiment probes, risking knocking all the equipment over. As if that weren't enough, before lift-off Buzz Aldrin discovered that he had accidentally broken off the ascent engine arming switch with his backpack. Had he not had the presence of mind to close the circuit by pushing the tip of a felt-tip pen into the hole of the broken switch, they would have been trapped on the Moon forever. Added to this is a chilling detail that long remained little known: right after the descent engine shut down, the residual fuel trapped in the lines began to freeze in the cold of space, creating an ice plug that blocked the line. Internal pressure began to rise steeply, bringing the Lunar Module's line to the brink of a thermal explosion, which was avoided only by spontaneous thawing at the last useful moment before structural failure.

The Apollo 12 mission, which was supposed to be a smooth precision landing, nearly crashed into the Atlantic Ocean less than a minute after launch. The Saturn V, launched during a thunderstorm, was struck twice by lightning , which apparently knocked out the entire inertial platform and the fuel cells of the Command Module, sending all the telemetry systems haywire. Only thanks to the intuition of flight controller John Aaron, who told the astronauts to flip the state of a switch ("try SCE to Aux!"), did the crew manage to restore telemetry and save the mission before the vehicle had to be abandoned in an emergency. Once on the Moon, the exploration was hobbled within minutes: Alan Bean accidentally pointed the only color TV camera straight at the Sun, instantly burning out the Vidicon tube and depriving the world of television coverage of the first real geological exploration in history. The crew's safety was threatened until the very last second: during splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, the impact with the water was so violent that a 16 mm camera broke loose from its mount and hit Alan Bean square on the forehead, almost knocking him out, giving him a serious concussion and forcing him to be patched upby his crewmates while they were still bobbing in the waves.

The case of Apollo 13 is carved into the history of human survival. A short circuit in the wiring of an internal heater caused the catastrophic explosion of oxygen tank number 2 in the Service Module, more than 320,000 kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft lost its ability to produce electricity, water and oxygen, forcing the three astronauts to take refuge in the Lunar Module and use it as a lifeboat to loop around the Moon in conditions of extreme cold, dehydration and possible carbon dioxide poisoning. Apollo 13's troubles had already begun at launch, when the center J-2 engine of the Saturn V second stage shut down more than two minutes early because of severe pogo vibrations that threatened the structure, forcing the other four engines to burn much longer to make up for the serious loss of thrust. We refer you to Ron Howard's cinematic masterpiece for all the details of this thrilling and extremely difficult space rescue.

Apollo 14 too, launched after almost a year of engineering reviews, was plagued by problems. On the way out, Stuart Roosa needed almost two hours and six grueling attempts to dock the Command Module with the Lunar Module, because of a defect in the probe's capture mechanism that threatened to cancel the landing. During the descent, the landing computer received a false "abort" signal from a button with a faulty solder joint; to prevent the engine from shutting down halfway through the descent to the lunar surface, engineers on the ground had to change the computer's flight software sequence in real time, reading the astronauts long strings of code to bypass the fault. Once on the lunar surface, the first episode of crew disorientation in space occurred: Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell told Houston's Mission Control Center that they had lost sight of the mission's main objective: Cone crater, although it was later established that the astronauts were on its slopes. Because of the lack of significant, reliable landmarks nearby, and the misleading, close lunar horizon that tended to disorient them by distorting their reading of actual distances, the crew had to give up exploring this important geological feature, losing all the information they had hoped to gather about the origins of the Fra Mauro crater area. During the exploration, the astronauts also had great difficulty pulling along the unstable tool cart (called the MET), which in the low lunar gravity kept tipping over. Exhausted, with their heart rates through the roof and running low on oxygen, they were told to slow down, reducing the scientific return expected from the mission. Later photos taken from orbit showed that, as far as Cone crater was concerned, the astronauts had come within just twenty meters of the goal (the rim of the crater, that is) that they had lost sight of.

With Apollo 15 came, at last, the time of the h igh-science missions called "J" missions, which also introduced the Lunar Rover, an engineering gem that nonetheless was not free of technical problems. The mission began with a scare when the astronauts, at the end of the landing, set the Lunar Module Falcon down with one leg inside a small crater, tilting dangerously backward by 11 degrees, almost compromising the maximum safe angle for lift-off. If thetilt had exceeded 15 degrees, the APS ascent engine could not have guaranteed the correct orbital insertion trajectory, dooming the crew to certain death. During the excursions, the Rover proved to be a rebellious vehicle: partly without front steering because of an electrical fault, it forced the crew into constant course corrections over terrain full of hazards that could not be judged properly from a distance. Jim Irwin and David Scott later admitted to the constant fear that the low lunar gravity and excessive speed on slopes could overturn the very light metal frame beyond repair, trapping them under it far from the Lunar Module. The troubles did not end even on the return to Earth: during atmospheric reentry, one of the three giant main parachutes failed to open properly, collapsing on itself. The capsule Endeavour therefore hit the waves of the Pacific Ocean held up by only two parachutes, taking a very hard impact that could have cracked the spacecraft and let water in, or worse, seriously injured the crew.

Apollo 16 carried the exploration program forward, but not without mishaps along the way. Besides significant technical problems in Earth orbit with the Saturn V third stage, which considerably delayed the departure for the Moon, the mission is known for a clumsy surface accident: commander John Young, tripping over his own feet, accidentally tore out the main power cable of the lunar heat flow experiment (ALSEP), making a very expensive instrument unusable and wiping out years of scientific planning. Many of the photographs taken during this mission, moreover, came out hazy or damaged because fine lunar dust, through a lapse by the crew, had got into the delicate mechanisms of the Hasselblad cameras. But Apollo 16's moment of pure terror came in lunar orbit: after separating from the Command Module, John Young and Charlie Duke were forced to hold position for six grueling hours, while Houston's Mission Control debated whether to cancel the landing for good. The main engine (SPS) of the Command and Service Module piloted by Ken Mattingly had in fact a critical fault in its steering control systems (gimbals). If the engine had started to shake out of control during the burn to return to Earth, the crew could never have come home and the mission would have turned into a deadly orbital trap.

Even Apollo 17, the last and seemingly smoothest of the missions, constantly flew in the shadow of a deadly, invisible danger. During the days of the mission, the telescopes of the SPAN solar alert system (Solar Particle Alert Network) monitored intense activity in the solar corona. Months before the last flight, in August 1972, the Sun had released a colossal coronal mass ejection (CME) so powerful that, had it hit a crew in transit between the Earth and the Moon, it would have delivered lethal radiation doses or caused very serious radiation sickness. NASA was operating on a statistical and ballistic bet: since solar particles take two to three days to reach lunar orbit, in the event of an extreme solar flare it was hoped there would be enough time to bring the crew home before the deadly wave hit the spacecraft. On the surface, the last mission also faced extremely draining practical emergencies: commander Gene Cernan accidentally tore off the Lunar Rover's right rear fender with his geology hammer. This seemingly trivial breakage quickly became a nightmare, as the wire-mesh wheel began to throw huge waves of gray, abrasive dust onto the astronauts' brilliant white suits, as well as onto the delicate thermal equipment, threatening to overheat and irreparably destroy the vehicle's vital systems. The solution came not from science-fiction technology but from raw human ingenuity in an emergency: the astronauts repaired the fender using gray duct tape, clamps and lunar maps, literally saving the final excursions from paralysis.

Considering this long and often harrowing series of accidents, failures, explosions and breakdowns averted at the last minute (which is in fact much longer, but impossible to report in full here, although it can be fully verified by consulting the complete radio recordings in the Apollo Flight Journal) the conspiracy claim that everything went 'too well to be true' is revealed for what it is: a carefully crafted lie that exploits the general public's widespread historical ignorance of the subject. The success of the Apollo program was not the product of a flawless Hollywood script, but the fruit of engineering genius, of system redundancy and of the extraordinary human ability to handle the unexpected and defeat the mathematical probability of a death foretold, with all due respect to the denialist doom-mongers ...