conspiracy theories all fail on the question "why would anyone bother?" and also on the "is it likely that the 100,000 other people involved would ALL decide to keep quiet about it for 60 years?"
and considering that we are now talking about sending people to Mars, then the rest of the world has moved on from this Nixon era bullshit
If you're the head of NASA and you've been given billions of dollars to take us to the moon by the end of the 60s as a show of strength during the cold war, and it gets to be the late 60s and you are still pretty far short of being able to go to the moon, and maybe you have some accidents while testing equipment like the one that killed a few astronauts in 1967, but the public is still expecting you to deliver on the promise of going to the moon even though it's unrealistic at current levels of tech, that's a good enough reason to bother. People lie to save face all the time.
But why would Soviet Russia go along with it? Surely they would have had reason to deboonk it?
Plenty of people died just trying to get planes in the air, they didn't just decide to fake that either
"is it likely that the 100,000 other people involved would ALL decide to keep quiet about it for 60 years?"
The answer you are looking for is "No"
There are no issues in putting humans on the moon and there never was, hence that's why we are going back: https://www.space.com/nasa-plans-artemis-moon-base-beyond-2024.html
Who says all 100,000 people knew it was a hoax? If they were trying to get to the moon but couldn't do it, most of those people would still be doing their jobs thinking the part of the project they're working on is going fine. Likely only a few hundred people would know and they'd likely have an eye kept on them to make sure they don't talk.
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