There is no possible way that the moon expeditions could have been faked

The argument

The case that the moon landings could not have been faked rests less on the physical evidence than on the practical difficulties a hoax would have faced. The first is scale. A great many people were involved in the space missions, across every part of their planning and execution, and each of them is a source of evidence that the missions actually happened. A deception large enough to cover the whole programme would have had to hold across all of those participants without a single one of them producing an account that contradicted it. The second difficulty concerns the number of missions flown. The Apollo programme was not a single flight but several missions, including ones that never reached the moon at all. If the objective had simply been to beat the Soviet Union by being first to put a man on the moon, then the objective was achieved the moment the first successful landing was announced. There would have been no reason to take the trouble of mounting five further missions afterwards. Each additional flight was an additional opportunity for a fabrication to fail, and a programme willing to run that risk five more times for no further gain makes little sense as a deception. The third difficulty is the reaction of the country the hoax would have been aimed at. The Soviet Union was the United States' rival in the space race and had every incentive to expose a fraud, along with the technical means to detect one. Instead it acknowledged Apollo's success. Had the Soviets believed the Americans had cheated, they would have denounced it rather than conceded the achievement. Because there is no possible way the moon expeditions could have been faked, this argument concludes, the Apollo missions were not faked.

Context

As in most discussions, one can consider the opposite thesis (fake) on the basis of simple reasoning

Premises

Counter-arguments

Only a limited number of people involved in the program knew it was a fake. The majority of the people involved believe in the mission in good faith.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The number of participants is not itself evidence, and the reply on record is that most could have acted in good faith while a few knew otherwise; the premise needs what those people left behind — the retroreflectors still used for laser ranging by observatories in several countries, the samples analysed in laboratories worldwide — rather than a headcount. [Rejecting P2] Asking why five further missions were flown is an argument about motive rather than about evidence, and a deception could in principle be repeated, so the premise cannot establish that none occurred. [Rejecting P3] Soviet acknowledgement is decisive only because the USSR was independently tracking the flights with its own instruments; stated as bare acknowledgement it invites the reply that a rival might stay silent for reasons of its own, and the premise omits the tracking that makes the point hold.