Anyway, unlike many of the fine people, I am not an engineer or scientist. I do not claim to have any particular skill with math; if anything its below average, but I can still research as well as I can and ask questions from people who do this stuff for a living. I can also point out when hoax proponents make outright lies in their claims. I have learned so much on this forum, and I can say the fine people of this forum are polite and articulate. They only get snarky when some hot stuff pulls out the well (well!) trodden claims and try to pretend they have found something earth shattering.
I'd put myself in the same category as Raven. I'm also not an engineer or scientist, but I did enough maths and science at school that I can understand most of the maths discussed here and can follow the rest even if I can't do the maths myself.
I've also been investigating hoax claims for about 20 years, so I'm also wearily familiar with plenty of claims that visitors here think they're the first to bring to our attention.
Having said that, there are still plenty of cases where I learn something new. But in almost every case, it's learning something new about the reality of Apollo, and only occasionally a new hoax claim I haven't heard before.
Here's a question I'd like answered by jr Knowing: What is even the point of faking it? If you pull it off, it's a major propaganda coup, but the USSR would have been the very hardest to fool, as they had their own failed moon landing program and an extensive and very successful unmanned lunar exploration program. It's basically the first rule of any successful scammer: know your mark. If the US realized they couldn't pull it off, why not focus on other things, like the USSR did with space stations and Venusian exploration after the explosive failure of the N1 rocket. If the USSR realized the moon landings were fake, which, from their knowledge they would most certainly have, they would have every motivation to trumpet it to the world as their own propaganda coup.
Yes, something important to understand here - the Russians/Soviets were the masters of fakery and misdirection. In the case of their military forces, the term was maskirovka, but they applied the concept broadly, including in their space program. This was because they recognised both the propaganda value of the space program and the ease with which they could exploit it.
Therefore, the Russians never announced their launches ahead of time. This allowed them to cover up their launch failures, giving them the appearance of a 100% launch success rate when the American failures were there for all to see.
It worked in other ways too: they might make a bland statement about a mission objective, and let the Western media draw whatever excessive implications they wished; so when they announced that Vostoks 3 and 4 would approach to within a few kilometres of each other, Western media assumed the Soviets had worked out how to do a rendezvous in space, which they hadn't...but it played into the image of the Soviet lead in the Space Race.
But almost the biggest success of the Soviet space program was convincing people in the West that they hadn't been racing the Americans throughout the 1960s to get men on the Moon. They successfully pushed the line that all they'd ever been interested in was unmanned exploration of the Moon because it was cheaper and safer. Sure, it was cheaper and safer, but they had certainly been racing the Americans to put actual people on the Moon, and only really gave up when they couldn't make their N1 rocket work.
Now NASA knew most of this, and some of their knowledge of what the Soviets were actually up to influenced some of their decisions. For example, knowing the Soviets had a very large rocket on a launch pad played a part in convincing them to send Apollo 8 to the Moon in December 1968.
But the fact that NASA could see at least part way through the Soviet deceptions also meant they'd have had a good idea that they'd have no hope of getting away with a fake themselves. And in the propaganda context of the Cold War, being caught faking something would be worse than not attempting it at all (which is why the Soviets exploited the propaganda value of what they did, rather than faking anything themselves). (Apart from which, the Americans were quite confident they could go to the Moon.)
So the only options with regard to sending men to the Moon was either (a) don't attempt it (the Soviet decision), or (b) actually do it (the American decision). Option (c), faking it, simply wasn't a viable option.
Those who think a moon-landing hoax is plausible make a mistake that is as common as it is peculiar: They assume that attempting an actual manned moon-landing has a large possibility of failure, but that
executing a hoax would somehow be automatically successful.
This makes no sense. Flying to the Moon is an engineering problem with known (or knowable) equipment requirements. You need large, multi-stage rockets, a guidance system that can navigate there & back, a vehicle that can land and take off, and life support systems to keep your crew alive. You can also send unmanned probes to measure the environment between here & there to help define your craft. All of these can be built & tested in a methodical, step-by-step process.
Everything is in the open. Nobody has to be looking over their shoulder or dealing with attacks of conscience . If they fail, the root causes can be found & fixed and they can try again. No honor is lost because everyone knows it is damn difficult. Even if the government decides it's not worth the cost to continue and pulls the plug, everyone knows it was a good try and at least we learned a lot in the effort.
On the other hand, one slip-up when perpetuating a hoax - one turncoat, one leaked document, one communications gaffe (you can't know who will be listening, or with what equipment), one special effect that's less than perfect - and you are the center of a national disgrace for all time. America's credibility is shot and very senior officials in the government will be convicted of felony fraud and go to prison for years. Don't forget that the secret
has to be kept for all time: No matter when it's found out, it will still be a world-wide public-relations storm that would make Iraqi WMDs look like an absent-minded goof. It doesn't matter how old you are, you can still be put on trial.
For those who think we faked-it to show-up the Soviets, do they really think that an administration that couldn't cover-up a 3rd-rate hotel burglary could keep this secret from the KGB? Do they think that America's mortal enemy would not use this as the ultimate proof before the entire world of capitalism's perfidity and corruption?
Don't forget that, as far as we knew, the Soviets were also going to land on the Moon, whether we made it or not. They didn't cancel their program until 1976. If we faked it and they did it for real, then who has the technological upper hand?
Any way you look at it, faking it would be more risky and less likely to succeed - with more dire cost to the nation in the event of failure - than actually digging-in, doing the work and going for real.
