Original article (in Croatian) was published on 30/4/2026; Author: Anja Vladisavljević
The Christina Koch who took part in NASA’s Artemis II mission is not the same Christina Koch who appeared in Mad Max: Fury Road. The two women simply share the same name.
The conspiracy theory claiming that human spaceflight is staged continues to circulate online, with a new version emerging after NASA’s Artemis II mission.
Social media users are now falsely claiming that NASA astronaut Christina Koch is actually an actress hired to “perform” in the latest lunar mission.
“Besides appearing in ‘Artemis II’, Christina Koch also had a minor role in the film ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’,” reads a Facebook post published on April 13, 2026 (archived here).
The post includes a short video in which Koch shares her impressions after completing the mission.
Returning to the Moon after more than half a century
The four astronauts – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen and Christina Koch – returned safely to Earth on April 10 after flying around the Moon. They became the first astronauts to travel to the vicinity of the Moon since the Apollo programme of the 1960s and 1970s.
The crew returned with valuable observations of little-studied lunar craters, a solar eclipse and meteor impacts on the Moon, which scientists hope will provide new scientific insights.
Glover, Koch and Hansen also made history as the first Black astronaut, the first woman and the first non-American citizen to participate in a lunar mission.
The Artemis programme was launched in 2017, and Artemis II marked its first crewed flight. Its long-term goal is to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon and prepare for future missions to Mars.
An astronaut with extensive experience
According to her official NASA biography, Christina Koch is an engineer and researcher who became a NASA astronaut in 2013. Before joining the astronaut corps, she worked on developing scientific instruments for space missions and conducted scientific fieldwork in both Antarctica and the Arctic.
She later served as Chief of the Crew Branch within NASA’s Astronaut Office and completed a rotation as Technical Integration Assistant to the Director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
“Her previous spaceflight experience includes living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for nearly all of 2019 as part of Expeditions 59, 60 and 61. She travelled to the station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, undergoing extensive training in Russia beforehand. Christina spent a total of 328 consecutive days in space and participated in the first all-female spacewalks,” her biography states.
It also lists her hobbies as “surfing, rock and ice climbing, coding, community service, triathlon, yoga, backpacking, woodworking, photography and travel.”
An actress with the same name
In 2013, the same year Christina Koch became a NASA astronaut, Mad Max: Fury Road was being filmed in Namibia. The Christina Koch who appears in the post-apocalyptic film – a story about a woman who rebels against a tyrannical ruler with the help of a group of female prisoners – is a completely different person who happens to share the same name.
She is credited as one of the five actresses portraying the Vuvalini tribe alongside Melita Jurišić, Gillian Jones, Joy Smithers and Antoinette Kellermann. Actress Joy Smithers confirmed to AFP that their colleague is not the NASA astronaut.
“Our Christina from the Vuvalini tribe was cast in Namibia. She didn’t have an agent and was originally working with the costume department when she auditioned. During filming she was in her fifties, she still lives in Namibia, and she is not an astronaut,” Smithers said.
There is therefore no connection between the two women beyond the coincidence of sharing the same first and last name. As Faktograf has previously reported, there is no evidence that NASA’s Artemis II mission was filmed in a studio or staged.
In conclusion, the claim that Artemis II was faked because Christina Koch appears in Mad Max: Fury Road is a classic example of misinformation built on a simple coincidence. Although they share the same name, one Christina Koch is a Namibian woman who appeared in the film, while the other is a NASA scientist and astronaut who participated in the Artemis II mission.
