That seems sketchy. This thread isn't getting the attention I was hoping for, so I'll just throw my ideas out and let you all pick them apart like the rotten vultures you are.
Assuming that the earth is flat and spaceflight is impossible, let's back up to the beginning of the cold war.
Russia and the United States, the two new great superpowers following the end of the second world war, both understood that spaceflight would be extremely difficult due to peculiarities of the earth's magnetic and gravitational field stemming from it's flat shape. No conclusive evidence, however, had yet been discovered to show that spaceflight was, in fact, impossible.
Given this, Soviet Russia was the first to give up on its space program and simply lie. In an effort to demonstrate superiority over the United States, the soviets built a specialized array of antennas, designed to bounce focused signals off the earths ionosphere, in order to simulate signals ostensibly sent from the fictional probe Sputnik. The soviet ploy worked, and the united states was understandable frightened to hear that the USSR had accomplished such a monumentally difficult task.
Rather than admit the inadequacy of their space program, however, the United States instead unknowingly took the same course of action as their soviet counterparts, and simply began lying about their space program. The imaginary spacecraft of both sides became increasingly complex directly as each country honed it's counterfeiting skills and technology. When they had gathered sufficient data and expertise, the United States launched the Apollo missions and won the space race.
Since then, other countries have ostensibly gained space technology, but in reality every country that claims to have a space program initiated the lie for power and to demonstrate the proficiency of their counterfeiting experts. If any space-capable organization were to let on to the hoax, it would result only in an enormous loss of credibility and severe retribution from other nations who would also be discredited.
-Sputnik was faked by specialized transmitter antennaes
-The Moon Landings were staged in a studio in Kentucky.
-The space shuttles launch and immediately land at a secret landing strip on a small island off the eastern coast of south america.
-The space shuttle Challenger was intentionally destroyed to generate public sympathy for the peril of space travel.
-The Space Shuttle Columbus was an ICBM that was destroyed by American defensive positions. The administration in power used the ostensibly-orbiting shuttle as a convenient excuse to cover up the attack and prevent mass panic.