[HelloMcFly]

> With a unified purpose, it would be enough. The theater would be grand enough. The political pressure to accept would be grand enough.

I suppose they could pull it off if everyone truly bought in, but I don't believe for one second that that many people committed to science and engineering would be as committed and diligent as they would need to be to keeping the lie intact at the time, and I certainly don't believe the commitment to the lie would sustain over time. This goes double given the lack of popular support for doing it.

Further, I am not sure even if everyone at NASA that would have to know it was fake was working with automaton-like commitment to their task that we could fool the USSR with a fake landing given they'd have every incentive coupled with the technological means to prove it was fake.

[mrangle]

Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing. Whether or not I agree with your assessment.

In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.

To illustrate, do you think that US alphabet agencies haven't uncovered critical top secret and massively damaging information about the USSR / Russia since WWII? And vice versa? Perhaps uncovering such information on a constant basis?

Why don't these agencies ever publicly reveal it? Virtually ever?

The public's concept of government is not the same as that of leadership.

[HelloMcFly]

> Arguing the personnel politics of the hypothetically fake Moon landing addresses a different argument than the one that I and the OP were addressing.

You assert "imagine that everyone at NASA was working to fake the landing instead of landing. With a unified purpose, it would be enough".

I assert "I do not believe that to be the case when thinking about the real people that would be asked to do this in a real-world setting". That's setting aside the physical evidence (i.e., Russia observing the moon lander) entirely. I don't see that as changing arguments, I see it as an extension of your assertion.

> In regard to the need to "fool" the USSR, I'd point out that you are making a large assumption that governments are always as antagonistic at the top levels of leadership as the public is led to be and believe.

It is not a large assumption to say the Space Race was competitive (and certainly at times outwardly antagonistic), though the politics certainly weren't simply black and white.

The moon landing required too much physical evidence, too many whole human beings, and had too many observers to be plausibly fakeable in my view. I'll leave it there vs. getting into a debate on alphabet agency secret-keeping. Occam's Razor isn't perfect, but it's most clearly not on the "fakeable moon landing" side.