I suppose what got my interest was a children's comic, Eagle, which featured on its front page the adventures of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, who flew around the solar system meeting the inhabitants of, mainly, Venus. By the time Sputnik was launched, I was already taking a magazine called Flying Review which had good space coverage and I had already read a few non-fiction books on astronautics. After that I naturally followed the developing space programmes of both the USSR and USA. While my engineering career was mainly on the aircraft side of the aerospace industry, I did get involved in the early days of the Shuttle as a member of the Hawker-Siddeley team that collaborated with McDonnell-Douglas on the Phase B design studies, back when the thing was going to be fully reusable.
As to the Apollo hoax, I first came across that in 1997 when a colleague at British Aerospace showed me a copy of X-factor magazine and challenged me to refute their claims. It was a few years later that I discovered the extensive presence of the hoax on the Internet.
