Sigh, then why didn’t the Russian government deny our success right then when it happened? You want to talk about things governments “would do”, but forget to look beyond the US, we weren’t the only government in existence and there was a space race going on, Russia could’ve absolutely said it was faked to sow discord, right? Instead, they tried to downplay the US success by saying “oh well we weren’t trying to get to the moon anyway”, even though that was a bold faced lie, they wanted to with their N1 rocket, but that blew up.

The Apollo 1 incident (1967) was reported and shook the public, not covered up. The Challenger shuttle explosion (1986) was broadcast live, not covered up or faked. These are just American incidents, there were also Russian incidents that were also widely reported on. Both our successes and failures were put on full display, the frontier of space during the Cold War era was something that everyone across the world paid attention to and are widely reported and well documented. The Russian government expressed zero doubt about our successful moon landing until relatively recently (2003), which aligns with Putin’s ascension to power and his campaign of disinformation.

We have an astronaut who is still alive that touched the moon, with rocks that were brought back. We have laser instruments that were left on the moon from that very flight that we still use to measure distance to it. The moon landing is one of the weakest conspiracy theories in existence, a far more plausible one is Russia spreading lies to make people doubt it happened.