If I wanted to build a single telescope mirror with a diameter of hundreds of meters, the way I’d do it would be to launch a giant mylar balloon into space, plus a big lump of glass and some way of heating it. Then, I’d inflate the balloon at very low pressure, and blow a bubble of molten glass inside it. With no gravity, air currents, etc., you could make that bubble a very good sphere, and then once it’s solidified, slice it up into segments to use as mirrors. You’d have to have a secondary mirror precisely shaped to correct for spherical aberration, but that could be much smaller.
I would say the opposite. Gravity isn’t a factor in orbit, and things can be much bigger than on the ground. Granted, they have to be lifted there, but things that must be solid on the ground to support the weight can be very light in space. And much of space exploration has objects that unfold and expand once away from Earth, not to mention things like the space station that was assembled in orbit from multiple launches.
As an example, I refer you to Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, The Wind from The Sun, about a race between "sail"boats, using the solar wind. The sails were miles across, very thin reflective mylar, and were used exactly like sails on ordinary ships, but bigger, because the force was extremely weak.
I think it is folly to say that we will never build, or cannot build, a telescope on the ground that will resolve tiny objects on the Moon. As science advances, some things that were inconceivable have become possible, even commonplace. I can imagine some technology that makes it possible to image objects in fine detail even if really far away. It may not be a simple optical device at all.
Not that it will satisfy the CTers.
I don’t think this argument works very well. As you note, gravity is a significant factor in getting to orbit, and one consequence of this is that the largest things that have been carried to orbit - certainly including telescopes - are very much smaller than large examples of comparable objects on the ground.
A telescope wouldn’t prove anything. The reflectors and other equipment were deposited there after the fact by unmanned vehicles.
They PUT those things there to BLOCK us. I don’t know see any need for POLICING of us hoaxers.
But once in orbit, or assembled in orbit, gravity isn’t a large factor in keeping parts together. They don’t have to contend with that large force and plan for support.
Granted, the space station in 2001 was fictional, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be built. That same structure on the ground would have to have a different design to contend with gravity.
And you don’t have to equate large with heavy or rigid. The Wind From The Sun example was a super-thin sail many miles across. It was large, but relatively light, and could be carried into space as a small object and unfurled there.
Many space vehicles have been folded or compressed into a compact mass, then expanded in space or at their destination, like Mars.
Right.
But (as we’ve seen) a telescope capable of resolving small objects on the moon would have to be on the order of hundreds of meters across. To build this on earth would be stunningly expensive; on orbit, it would cost thousands of times more.
The OP asks for telescope that can image the landing sites in a manner that avoids accusations of fraud. This is sufficiently narrow a problem, that I think we can safely say such a telescope will never be built. This isn’t to say that a ground based telescope that is capable of imaging the sites won’t be built, just that it will involve enough additional technological wizardry that there won’t be a simple eyepiece to look through, and the conspiracy nuts will have plenty of points in the system to point at to claim that the image could be tampered with. A multi-mirror long multi hundred metre baseline telescope may well be built. The astronomers learnt the hard way with Hubble that part of the price of being allowed to build the instrument is that you have to do a bit of imaging purely for public consumption, so you can be sure that if a 'scope was built could image the landing sites, they will, and early.
One of the reasons the next major space telescope is a huge infra-red device (The James Webb Space Telescope) is that ground based telescope have reached the point where they are surpassing Hubble. Not just with active optical correction systems, but also opportunistic image capture systems, that select out the stable images and build very high resolution final images. Even amateurs can get into the act and achieve remarkable results. (I would have been stoked to get pictures that good of Jupiter when I was a kid, the idea of a moon of Jupiter that good, with the same telescope would have been beyond imagining.)