Dutchy, if YOU were intentionally trying to deceive the whole world with something like the Lunar landings don't you think that YOU would make it look real?
Well, NASA spent 28 billion actual dollars which would amount to about $288.1 billion in 2018 values.
Surely if they were really trying to fabricate it they would make it look so real that even YOU might think it looked real - not that you'd have a clue what "real" would be like
!
The moonlandings were state of the art special effects of that era.
Far better than what was available in the smaller budget film industry.
But in the eighties SF was on par with Apollo and nowadays SF vastly excedes the Apollo movie.
As you may know i am into 'music' and Ray Kurzweil invented sampling. A real instrument was recorded and the recording was used to for multiple velocities , several semi-tones etc.
Due to a very limited sample memory they had to pull of many tricks to play a piano sound from an 88 keybed.
The first synth (K250) sounded like pure magic.... a piano, string ensemble, trumpet, synth sounds..... Stevie Wonder immidiatly ordered one.
We all thought it sounded genuine, magical, superb in the early eighties.
Now i have piano's that are more than 200 Gb in size.... the first sampled Kurzweil piano (0.5 Mb)is total crap by comparison.
But in the early eighties we all thought it was spot on... and couldn't get any better.
The same applies to Apollo... looked fantastic and stunning in the days, but utter crap with our modern 'eyes' .
No one at NASA could have phantomed the influence consumer computer technology would have on our overall perception of reality and all attempts to mimick reality.