If the moon landings had been faked, how many would have been "in" on the conspiracy?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Scientific American, the magazine, surmised something was in the works when many of its subscribers (who listed their occupation as physicist) had their subscription mailed to a P.O. box in New Mexico. For this reason, Scientific American thinks that my occupation is bus driver while I work on a top-secret project.

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Back to the OP …

It depends on how much NASA had to fake. e.g.

If the Saturn V really worked and could send stuff into at least Earth orbit you could get by with a much smaller in-on-the-fake secret crew versus if the thing couldn’t even stand up under its own weight, much leave the launch pad. If NASA could get the LM/CM/SM stack to orbit the Moon & come back a few days later, just not with people on board, it’d get even easier.

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One of the guys where I used to work is convinced the landings were faked. He is an intelligent person- does have strong views- but I can’t get him to explain why he thinks it never happened. It is really weird.

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Not to mention the need to build the massive rocket:

Don't forget we're not just faking Apollo 11, but 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. With Apollo 13 a faked near-disaster because ? We're probably needing several thousand people to be in on the conspiracy just in the United States. As has been pointed out, we've also got to contend with those friendly Soviets who'd surely spot a fake. Of course there's the inevitable moment when someone really gets to the moon and finds no trace of the Apollo missions which would make it monumentally stupid to try to lie about it in the first place.

Comparing a moon landing conspiracy to the Manhattan Project isn’t really fair. The Manhattan Project lasted only three years before its existence product became known, it happened during wartime when the people working on it would be very aware of the need for secrecy, and, of course, it wasn’t a secret in that the Soviets knew from their spies. The government at the time could count on the cooperation of the press to squelch any information that might leak out.

In contrast, everyone involved in faking the moon landings would have to have kept the secret for the past four decades. And leaking the information to the press couldn’t be considered treason like revealing the existence of an A-bomb program.