Have the Americans been on the Moon or it’s just a hoax as conspiracy theorists claim? All questions will be answered when the Russian cosmonauts visit the Earth’s satellite, Russia’s space boss, promised.

“We’ve set such a task – to go there and check if they were there or not,” Dmitry Rogozin joked in response to the popular question about the moon exploration. “The Americans say – they’ve been there. We’ll verify that.”

Switching to a more serious tone, he said that no country is currently capable of fulfilling a successful lunar program on its own. Russia expecting to cooperate with the US in exploring the Earth’s satellite, Rogozin said as he visited a Russian spacecraft engine manufacturer in Moscow.

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Russian cosmonauts will set foot on the Moon for the first time in the early 2030s as part of a 14-day mission, a recently revealed roadmap of the Russian lunar program said.

A Russian space station, built in the lunar orbit, may be employed to facilitate the landing.

Earlier in November, Rogozin said that the country is aiming to start constructing a permanent base on the Moon after 2025, with the project exceeding the US ‘Apollo’ program of 1960-72 in scale. The facility will be inhabited with avatar robots with cosmonauts only visiting from time to time, he said.

The machines will be remotely controlled by human operators, just like the blue-colored alien bodies used by the characters from James Cameron’s blockbuster ‘Avatar.’

Since US astronaut, Neil Armstrong, put his feet on the Moon on July 21, 1969 and said his famous: “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” skeptics have been questioning his feat.

READ MORE: Pandora, anyone? Russia plans to set up moon base inhabited by ‘avatar robots’

They claim that the first moon landing and the subsequent ones were actually staged by NASA, which needed a quick response to the USSR sending the first man into space, Yury Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. Iconic filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, was even mentioned as the possible director of the footage, presented by the US as proof they visited the Earth’s satellite.

Many of the arguments of conspiracy theorists have been debunked over the years, but between 7 and 20 percent of Americans still believe the lunar program to be hoax, according to various polls. As for the Russians, a survey this summer revealed that 57 percent were confident that the Americans never traveled to the Moon, but falsified all the evidence instead.

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