I have a friend who subscribes to the idea of a moon landing hoax. He refutes any evidence simply by expanding the scope of the hoax to include the source of the evidence.

In his mind, the hoax now includes vast swathes of government, academia, industry, media and so on.

However, he admits he has no answer to the question of why, in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union acknowledged and accepted the reality of the landings.

They, of all people had the technical means to disprove the event, and the motivation to do so. And yet they begrudgingly congratulated the USA on its achievement.

This is, as my friend admits, problematic to his hoax theory.

Notably, he does not see this as evidence that the landing took place, but simply a fact that he has not yet managed to find a means to refute.

There are a lot of comments here which seem to be directed at the original question. If you have issues about what the question says, your observations would be more impactful as answers of your own, not comments to mine.

Edwin Aldrin flew to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission and landed there on July 20, 1969. As he got older, he grew weary of moon landing deniers accusing him of lying and punched one in the mouth. General Aldrin is now 94 years old and I imagine he would still punch someone. He, Commander Neal Armstrong and pilot Michael Collins had flown on previous missions into earth orbit.

Those astronauts were engineers and rocket science became their specialty. They knew the odds and still flew by the seat of their pants to push the bounds of human exploration. The Soviet Union was racing to put their cosmonauts on the moon first. They did not succeed, but they knew that the USA was able to accomplish that first.

Three astronauts lost their lives in Apollo 1 during a launch test. Another died while flying an X-15 rocket plane to the edge of space. To deny the moon landings is to desecrate the memory of all those who were working to expand humanity’s horizons.

Actually he hasn’t been doing that at all. I saw some videos posted by a moron that can’t understand how the English language works. There were three clips in what I saw. I’ll paraphrase those clips.

Someone asked him what the scariest part of landing on the moon was and he said there was no scary moment, and that it could have been scary, but it wasn’t. Morons somehow interpreted this as him saying there was no landing.

Someone asked him why we haven’t gone back since the 60’s. And he said he’d like to know that himself but the fact is that we haven’t gone back. Morons have interpreted this as him saying we never went at all.

Someone says they saw them land on the moon on television. He said that no one saw them land because there were no cameras on the moon to record that, and that only animations of the landing were aired. Which is true. But there were cameras on the LEM, and after they landed, the cameras on the LEM recorded the first steps on the moon, and that’s what people watched. Morons have interpreted this as him saying Armstrong’s first steps were an animation.

In short, never underestimate how dumb morons can be.