The moon landings actually happened, and there's plenty of contemporaneous evidence of it. But what if the United States government wanted to fake a moon landing now?

We have the technology to create pretty convincing images of a moon landing. But is it enough?

My question is this: given the tools we have to uncover and spread information, how could a major government in the present day stage a new moon landing comparable to the Apollo 11 mission?

For the purpose of this question, assume the following:

• This is present-day Earth, except you can swap out relevant political leaders if you'd like.
  
  
  • But don't assume that they'll be in office when the hoax is completed.
  
  


• Pick any government you want as long as they can afford and execute this hoax, and can convince the world it was real.


• All previous lunar missions (manned or otherwise) happened as officially reported, and the results and observations taken from them are accurate.


• If the hoax is exposed by a major news outlet at any time before "launch" or within fifty years afterward, it is considered a failure.


• The government you choose announces plans for a real moon landing, and will at some point announce a formal "launch" date.


• The identity of the purported astronauts is public knowledge, and they're in on it.


• The hoax should not cost more than a real trip to the moon.


• There will be an international television broadcast of the landing. It doesn't need to be live, but the general public has to believe that it is.


• The "launch" must occur no later than July 20th, 2035.


• The hoax must not actually involve sending people to the moon. You can send objects or animals there if you have to.


• The more people or organizations who are in on the hoax, the more likely it will fail.


• The "mission" will be a quick visit to the moon, similar to the Apollo 11. You are not trying to convince people that you've colonized the moon.
  


• The hoax, once begun, will only be canceled if it's exposed.


• The hoax is of a successful lunar mission; the general public must believe that all of the "astronauts" went to the moon and safely returned.

We couldn't successfully fake the moon landings at anytime. They happened. They were real. This is why we could not fake them. First, a little back history to explain my point.

As you may remember, the United States and the Soviet Union were in a space race to see who could make the greatest accomplishments. The Soviet Union scored many firsts: first man in space, first woman, first robot to operate on another world. Both countries were carefully monitoring the communications of the other and a slew of other countries and amateur radio operators were monitoring as well. Not only could each side monitor, they could detect where in space the communications originated. Beyond that, both sides cooperated to make sure the other side did not step on radio communications. They knew the frequencies, they knew the technology used to send the signals.

On September 12, 1962, John F Kennedy threw the gauntlet down to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade with his, "We choose to go to the Moon" speech. After that, the race to the moon was on. The Soviet Union had a head start with their N1 rocket, but ran into issues with the rocket and with the unexpected death of Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of their space program. Politics mired their moon shot hopes. In the US, we lucked out because the Saturn rocket was already in development and we had a solid design for a liquid rocket engine, the Rocketdyne F1.

When it was obvious to the Soviet Union the Apollo Space Program was going to get a man on the moon first, they sent a probe to the moon to collect soil samples and return before Apollo 11 could do the same. It was the only one of two ways to score a victory from the race to the moon. Unfortunately, Luna 15 crashed into the moon on July 21, 1969. Apollo 11 touched down safely on July 24, 1969.

The last way the Soviet Union could score a coup was to prove the moon landing program was faked. They monitored communications, they knew the US touched down safely, they privately viewed live the same news feeds as the rest of the world.

If the Soviet Union could have proven the moon landings were faked, it would have been the greatest publicity coup in the history of mankind. The US would have been exposed as liars and their prestige forever tarnished.

The only people that believe the moon landings were faked are nimble-minded people who are incapable of admitting mankind did something extraordinary.

If you want to fake a moon landing in your world, you need to somehow disable amateur radio and competing governments from having an impact on your story. You would need to put a transmitter on the moon for signal origination. You would have to have a monster budget and hide the fact that you're faking a project that would require tens of billions in budgetary expenditures just to send the transmitter, let alone fake everything else and somehow convince 400,000 people required to support the project, the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities. At that point, you might as well send a man to the moon.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program


• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11


• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_15


• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

Good luck with your faking. Buzz Aldrin mocks your idea.

You can't.

I'll try for a shorter answer than my peers'.

Anyone can send a probe to the Moon if they've got the money and the motivation. In fact, China sent a couple ones in the last 12 years. A private organization from Israel also sent one in February this year. Google has prizes for people who do stuff like this. Japan has an orbiter there which actually took pictures of one of the Apollo mission sites.

If you're going to do a Moon landing, people will challenge you to disclose the coordinates so that they can verify it. If you just say "oh, we landed on the far side, it's hard to get a good view so don't bother", then everyone will assume you are lying, even if you did manage to go there.

If, however, you provide coordinates, you'd better be there and leave a trail. Otherwise, it won't take 90 days for a probe to fly over the place and send back photographic evidence that the site is untouched.

This can't be done

Too many telescopes having too much resolution. Too much thermal tracking. Too much radio telemetry.

Everybody would watch the launch. Many would watch the capsule's progress toward the moon. Most telescopes would loose it quickly, but some could watch it longer. Thermal tracking could watch it further still and simple radio telemetry would track it all the way to the moon.

It's theoretically possible to send them, oh, a third of the way way there, let them sit for three days, then bring them home, having never been to the moon, but what would be the point? It would be easier to simply go to the moon.

But I believe it would be impossible to not verify the astronauts were well outside high orbit.

You could fool an individual. You might fool a university. I doubt you could foot SETI. You can't fool the 1st-world nations of our planet.

Honestly this seems harder than actually landing on the moon so to do it I would get as close to an actual moon landing as possible.
I'd use China to take advantage of the authoritarian structure making secrets easier to keep. Build a real rocket and build some real looking lander style equipment and put it on the rocket and launch it to the moon. But with no astronauts.

Have the rocket land on the dark side of the moon (to prevent as many people seeing it as possible) and take a quick video on the moon in which while the doors are opening the rocket explodes. The exploding rocket (which if possible should have space suits and possibly even corpses in them) will hopefully cover the evidence and prevent you having to have actors pretend to have reached the moon. Have a quick fake video which seems to show success and then have it cut out and blame camera equipment failures. You want as little footage as possible as the more of it there is the more likely the faking will be uncovered. Then after a day or two have part of your rocket launch back towards earth and crash into the ocean. Then have your fake astronauts be found in a fake floating lander near where the rocket sank. Claim there were mechanical issues in reentry and the crew have suffered various injuries and head trauma to help explain if they get questions wrong or tell the truth.

The follow up is where you want to misdirect people. Act suspicious, and point the blame for the cameras and re-entry problems at all kinds of people. Arrest some of the engineers involved and accuse them of sabotage or corruption. Try to make it look like you are covering up high level embezzlement rather than the actual truth. Also get a bunch of internet trolls to make terrible and racist arguments claiming you faked the moon landing and if possible make it look like they are sponsored by the US or Russia to discredit people that figure out the truth.

The biggest issue is the number of people involved: given the number, the secret would be blown in no more than three years.

Now, technically it's plausible it could be done now. CGI could be used for the things that would be impossible to fake on Earth, like the lower gravity. The other parts are engineering. But...

1. ...you'd need to send an actual ship and an actual lander to the moon. They wouldn't have people on them; you'd use them to transmit a combination of pre-recorded audiovidual sent with the unmanned ship and audiovisual transmitted from the conspiracy headquarters to the ship to be broadcast back. An actual lander would be needed because the Doppler data contained in its signal could be used to verify its motion (this was actually done by radio astronomers in the real moon landings as an exercise). So you'd need to not only conduct a real landing, you'd need to conduct a real return launch and lunar rendez-vous. And...




2. ...there are images now of the real Apollo landing sites from lunar orbiters. Easy enough to fake those for your lunar satellites, but somewhat difficult to do so for those of other nations. What happens when the Indians or the Chinese have a satellite that just for giggles takes a look at the landing site but doesn't find a trace of any activity around the alleged landing site?

So, in short, can't be done. Not practically.