Os desembarques da lua eram reais.
No universo, a discussão entre Coop e o professor surge porque sua filha traz um livro que evidentemente contém imagens de alta qualidade dos pousos na lua. Isso entra em conflito com o novo ensino de que os desembarques na lua eram uma farsa, uma afirmação que é (ironicamente) uma farsa, destinada a garantir que os americanos não se desapontem com os planos do governo de reduzir as expectativas educacionais das pessoas (por exemplo, precisamos de mais agricultores e menos engenheiros).
Há um pouco mais de informação sobre o processo de pensamento de Coop na novela oficial do filme :
“She brought this to school,” she said. “To show the other kids the section on lunar landings…”
“Yeah,” he said, recognizing it. “It’s one of my old textbooks. She likes the pictures.”
“This is an old federal textbook,” Miss Hanley said. “We’ve replaced them with corrected versions.”
...
“You don’t believe we went to the moon?” Sure, he was aware that there had always been a fringe element—crazies who held to that cock-eyed nonsense. But a teacher? How could anyone with half a mind peddle that baloney?
...
Am I that out of touch? he wondered. Has it really gotten that bad?
He guessed he was, and that it had. He didn’t pay much attention to what little news there was, because he had long ago realized it was really mostly propaganda. But he hadn’t realized they had gone so far as to rewrite the freaking textbooks.
“Okay,” Okafor said, leaning forward. “Well, right now the world doesn’t need more engineers. We didn’t run out of planes, or television sets. We ran out of food.”
Cooper sat back in the chair, feeling the steam leak out of him.
“The world needs farmers,” Okafor continued, with a smile that was probably meant to be benign but just felt patronizing. “Good farmers, like you. And Tom. We’re a caretaker generation. And things are getting better. Maybe your grandchildren—”
Fora do universo, o diretor Christopher Nolan abordou esse ponto em uma entrevista com o Slashfilm :
But we don’t think of it in those terms. We think of ourselves as being the most magnificent, amazing universe ever and if we wanna go back to the Moon, sure, we could. It’s like no, those guys are all dead or retired. We’re not going back to the Moon. And if we wanted to, we’d have to spend billions of dollars and it would take years and years and years. We’re just done. We’re not doing that. We’re out of that business. And so people don’t think in those terms. We had to set the movie in the future in which that was abundantly clear.
e o escritor Jonathan Nolan também falaram sobre esta questão em uma entrevista com comingsoon.net onde ele deixa bem claro que o Interstellar está definido em um futuro em que fomos à lua e depois paramos:
If you look at the last 2,000 years and human civilization, things come and go. Just because we went to the moon doesn’t mean we’re going back to the moon. So the film had to be set in that kind of agrarian future to hammer that home.