Fifty years later, of everything that remains at the cosmic campsite, the American flag has had the worst time of it.

The flag is no longer standing. In fact, it’s been flat on the ground since the moment Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lifted off. As the Eagle module ignited its engines and rose, spewing exhaust around, Aldrin caught a glimpse of the flag falling from his window.

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The flag, made of nylon, was an off-the-shelf purchase. Unlike Earth, the moon lacks an atmosphere capable of blocking out the worst of the sun’s rays. It wouldn’t have taken long for the ultraviolet light to eat away at the dye and bleach the flag white. “Have you ever seen burnt newspaper from a fireplace? All the color is gone and everything,” says Dennis LaCarrubba, who worked at the New Jersey–based company that manufactured the flag. “That’s probably what the flag would look like now.”

The photographic evidence for this came decades later, thanks to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that still circles the moon today. The spacecraft’s camera photographed several Apollo landing sites. The NASA astronauts who flew to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s always brought American flags with them. In photos of later Apollo missions, you can see, amid all the pockmarked gray terrain, a little white smudge and, right next to it, a slightly bigger, black smudge—a flag, faded from the glow of the sun, and its shadow.

Scientists long thought that the sun exposure would cause the fabric to disintegrate, reducing the little monuments of American achievement to dinky poles surrounded by fibers. But the orbiter photos suggest that the fabric has withstood the conditions.

The photos also provide some defense against people who believe the moon landing was faked. Julie Stopar, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and a member of the lunar orbiter’s imaging team, carries postcards of the landing sites in case she runs into someone with doubts, including her own friends and family. “They’ll ask me jokingly—and in some cases, not so jokingly—‘Are you sure we really landed on the moon?’ And it’s like, ‘Yes, I am sure. I’ve seen it, and we have pictures of it,’” Stopar says. “And then I’ll show them the pictures and then they’re like, ‘Oh, okay, I guess that’s pretty convincing.’”

The resolution of the orbiter’s cameras isn’t strong enough to make out the Apollo astronauts’ boot prints, but some may have been blasted out of existence when the exhaust of the Eagle’s engines slammed into the regolith. Subsequent Apollo missions captured footage of the turbulent experience of liftoff. “You can see a severe blowing occurring; you can see flags flapping in the wind like it’s a hurricane; you can see dust lifting off the surface everywhere,” says Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida.