“Of course, the human went to the Moon”: Thomas Pesquet angry with the “manipulators”

The tirade of an astronaut. Thomas Pesquet did not hide his annoyance this Wednesday on Twitter after the spread of fake news diverting his comments about the Moon. Speaking last Sunday on France 2 on the occasion of the (aborted) launch attempt of the Artemis mission rocket towards the natural satellite, the French astronaut declared that “we are really going to go very far, as far as no human being has come”. he never left the Earth.”

It didn’t take long before a number of people hit the web and took his words for their own benefit. For some, the words of Thomas Pesquet mean that the human being has never been in the star, and that the feat of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins never took place.

Here Thomas Pesquet does not declare that the human being has never been on the Moon, but that no man has ever reached so far into space, as the French infojournalist Julien Pain explains, relaying on Twitter to the cameraman Defakator: “Apollo was orbiting at 200 km of the Moon, while Orion (the Artemis mission spacecraft, editor’s note) will orbit much further.”

“But why do we have to waste precious time on this again,” he replies on Twitter, “of course, the human went to the Moon during the Apollo missions, and there we will return.”

Another rocket launch attempt on Saturday

“It also worries me greatly to see how some have fun blurring the truth and others are being deceived”, writes the French astronaut again, “who wins in all this? Not NASA, not, but the manipulators who tell you that everything is false. .”

After a day of suspense, NASA announced that it would try to launch its new megarocket to the Moon again on Saturday, after a failed first attempt on Monday due to a technical problem.

“We have agreed to change our liftoff date to Saturday, September 3,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA’s manager of the Artemis 1 mission, which should mark the start of the US program to return to Earth. A program in which Thomas Pesquet intends to participate: “see you on the Moon in a few years,” he ends on Twitter.