Nasa launched the Artemis II mission last week, sending the first crewed spacecraft to the Moon in more than 50 years, but a small, dogged group of sceptics has claimed the whole thing is a hoax.
Media outlets, including The National, have posted videos and still photos from the Nasa mission to social media only to receive comments from users around the world insisting it is a sham.
"So fake …" wrote one sceptic commenting on a clip of the Artemis II crew speaking from space.
Another user on Facebook wrote under the same video: "It's like when you were a kid and thought Santa was real." Still another said: "They must be getting a huge action payday."
Sceptisim over Nasa's space exploration missions, particularly the original Moon landing, is far from new.
A 2022 survey of US residents conducted by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire showed that 10 per cent of respondents thought "Nasa faked the Moon landings".
The poll also found that a similar percentage believed that the Earth was flat, and that Covid-19 vaccines contained secretly implanted tracking microchips.
"Acceptance or openness to conspiracy beliefs was significantly higher among certain subgroups, including millennials and supporters of President [Donald] Trump," a report accompanying the survey read.
While those numbers might appear worrisome, the University of New Hampshire pointed out that "58 to 83 per cent agreed with statements of basic scientific facts – such as the Earth is billions of years old, or revolves around the Sun".
Those who insist that the Artemis II mission is a hoax are in the minority, but there has long been vocal scepticism over space exploration.
In the post-Watergate scandal era of filmmaking in the 1970s, conspiracy theories and hoaxes occupied a lot of plots. The 1977 science fiction film Capricorn One, however, took the hoax accusations about space travel to the silver screen.
James Brolin, Sam Waterston and OJ Simpson play Nasa astronauts getting ready for a groundbreaking journey to Mars when they are suddenly whisked away and told they must fake the mission in a makeshift TV studio in the middle of nowhere – an accusation levelled by Moon-landing deniers.
The film depicted the ease with which such a thing might be accomplished and the dedication the powers-that-be have to keeping the public in the dark to suit their own needs.
Today, however, the rise of artificial intelligence is adding a sense of realism to claims of space hoaxes.
The proliferation of AI apps that can create videos from a few lines of text that are difficult to discern from reality is creating a climate where even an abundance of evidence is greeted with sceptism.
Late last year, The National spoke about AI-generated videos with Sarah Bargal, an assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown who specialises in deep learning and computer vision.
"Nowadays we are becoming more sceptical of the videos that we are seeing," Prof Bargal said.
She said that AI apps are ending a belief established over the past few decades, in which videos were mostly "treated as proof".
Prof Bargal said that while various apps were quickly making it easier to identify and flag AI-generated videos, she was concerned by the "yet-to-be-matched pace in social science policies, law and other very important and connected disciplines".
The proliferation of AI also comes at a unique point in American political history, in what some have referred to as the post-truth era.
From climate change to vaccines, the Trump White House has questioned, sidelined or come out against several evidence-backed theories in science.
This has come full circle as the Trump administration seeks to gain scientific credibility through the Artemis II mission, only to have sceptics question it on social media. Critics of Mr Trump could also be using the scepticism over the mission as another means of hitting out at the White House.
