NVIDIA Debunks Lunar Landing Conspiracy Theories with RTX Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo

There are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there who don’t believe that the moon landing actually happened and who go out of their way to prove that it has all been one big hoax by clinging on to the smallest of details they do not understand, even claiming that the light in the landing video is ‘off’.

NVIDIA decided to do something about that, maybe not necessarily to prove the conspiracy theorists wrong but also to show off the GeForce GTX graphic processing units which realistically rendered the way light would have behaved on the moon.

NVIDIA created a nearly identical image of Buzz Aldrin who was backlit by the light that was bouncing off Neil Armstrong’s suit.

It’s not the first time NVIDIA is doing this – a few years ago they recreated the moon landing with the use of the Turing GPU tech which comes with real time ray-tracing technology. This technology captures the reflection of light as it happens.

You can watch the 2014 video below.

NVIDIA / YouTube

The updated demo we see today only serves to reinforce the original conclusion.

To update our original demo, NVIDIA engineers rebuilt the scene of the moon landing in Unreal Engine 4, a game engine developed by Epic Games. They simulated how the sun’s rays, coming from behind the lander, bounced off the moon’s surface and Armstrong’s suit, to cast light on Aldrin as he stepped off the lander.

All of this only heightened the fidelity of our latest demo — and re-confirmed what we’d discovered four years ago. That the illumination of the astronaut in the photo wasn’t caused by something other than the sun — such as studio lights — but by light doing what light does.

Which proves one of two things. Either the Apollo 11 landing is real. Or NASA figured going to the moon was too hard, built a time machine instead, and sent someone 50 years into the future to grab an NVIDIA RTX GPU.

– Brian Caufield for NVIDIA

You can draw your own conclusions by watching the updated demo video below. I, for one, never had a doubt.

NVIDIA GeForce / YouTube