FAQ

Apollo 18 is based on a screenplay by Brian Miller. The movie is shot in "found footage" style, presented as discovered film supposedly left behind by missing or dead characters.

No. It is only shot to look real. It is a normal scripted film, similar to The Blair Witch Project (1999) (1999) or Paranormal Activity (2007) (2007). The only "real" aspect is that some archival footage from NASA of previous Apollo missions is used in a few sequences. Also, at the end of the credits it has a disclaimer.

Yes, it was called the Lunniy korabl (LK, for short), developed in the late 1960s and tested on three occasions from 1970 to '71. Due to the failure of several N1 rocket launches, the LK was never used for a proper lunar mission. Interestingly enough, the LK was initially designed to be piloted solo, but it could accommodate a crew of two cosmonauts.

When the Apollo program began, there were plans for an Apollo 18, Apollo 19, and Apollo 20 mission to land on the moon. These were cancelled in 1970, and the hardware built for those missions was scrapped, repurposed or donated to museums. Some sources refer to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as Apollo 18, which was an orbital docking exercise and not a lunar mission.

By the time Apollo 17 finished in 1972, people stopped caring about moon missions. We had gone there enough times, so public interest had waned. Due to that and to excessive budget cuts, NASA decided to scrap future moon landing missions. It's important to remember that these are extremely dangerous and costly missions that don't necessarily bear fruits—as in expanding scientific knowledge or useful arts—so incentive is limited. Sending remote-controlled or autonomous robots is preferable for the foreseeable future, as far as publicly-funded projects are concerned.