Well you could send an unmanned probe and have send out encrypted transmissions, no? Or even pre-recorded transmissions. Or if you wanted to get fancy, you have the astronaut in a studio on Earth recording his transmissions; you send the transmissions steganographically a few minutes later, and the on-board computer sends them back as regular transmissions a few minutes after that. That way the faux-astronaut could even comment on current events.
Wouldn’t that work?
So the question becomes, "what would it take to fake a manned mars landing for real? " The Russians, the Europeans, the Australians, and probably the Chinese all have the capability to monitor deep space missions.
Pay them off? The cost of paying off whole nations, as well as your fake mission staff and fake astronauts is rapidly approaching the cost of mounting a real mission.
Bump them off? You now have Death Squads running around bumping off scientists, engineers and all of the reporters who are investigating their deaths. And you now have to pay off the squadders and hope they stay paid off, or bump them off. Life ain’t like a conspiracy movie, son.
So how do you explain a communications delay which would be twice as long as would be expected at Mars distance?
We would expect to see a live blast off of astronauts in a capsule suited for Mars landing. If it was faked, they would need to sneak back down to Earth at some point, or remain undetected in orbit for a couple of years.
We would expect to know the intimate details on how the astronauts would feed themselves over a one year journey, plus on the planet, plus a one year return journey.
We would expect to see updates from weightless astronauts in a suitable capsule possibly once a week for a year. I think radio telescopes could approximate the distance of those updates from Earth, but I’m not sure.
We would need to know how they were going to feed themselves whilst on Mars.
We would most certainly need to know how in the hell they planned on blasting off and obtaining escape velocity from another planet. Would they need to construct a launch tower while there? Would we need to deliver fuel and food ahead of time in preparation?
And again, countries with radio telescopes, hell probably even back yard astronomers would be monitoring all of this in real time.
The moon hoaxers didn’t need to consider all of these points, just the salient ones.
No, I’m good, thanks.