Unlike in the 60s these days it's far easier to just stage the moon landing rather than actually going there.
I also wonder how common privately held telescopes and radar equipment is, stuff that could detect a spacecraft on the way to the moon. It seems practically impossible to spot an actual landing with a telescope, but you could probably determine if something about the right size had acclerated out of Earth orbit and was heading to the moon. Window of hours, probably.
It'd be expensive to fake all this with enough fidelity to foil analysis tools that exist today (much less tools that will be available over the next few decades). It's probably cheaper to actually land on the moon again :-)
The Russians could certainly track the vehicle on radar, at least on the boost there and return trajectory, and pick up any of its signals. Jodderal Bank in the UK certainly did. There’s no way they could reasonably have fooled the entire global optical and radio astronomy community plus the Russians.
That’s all aside from the fact the limitations of video technology at the time would have made faking the video impossible because the tape tech to record a transmission that long didn’t exist for almost another decade. Or the fact thousands of people would have had to be in on the scam, many of them not even American.
Also since then, multiple Lunar observation missions have photographed the equipment and even the dust trails left by the lunar rovers. The Chinese would also certainly know by now, with their recent high resolution surveys and landings on the moon.
My understanding is that people believe that they did indeed launch a rocket but that the landing on the moon was faked. Some claim they were in orbit around the earth the whole time, some others claim they went around the moon but staged the landing. There are even some who believe that we did land on the moon but there was a tape that was staged in the event of an accident. The level of moon landing denial varies by each and every person.
My two personal favourites being the people who believe we didn't go to the moon and get all our technology from aliens, and the truly amazing Krishna version;
>"The Vedic account of our planetary system is already researched, concluded, and perfect. The Vedas state that the moon is 800,000 miles farther from the earth than the sun. Therefore, even if we accept the modern calculation of 93 million miles as the distance from the earth to the sun, how could the “astronauts” have traveled to the moon–a distance of almost 94 million miles–in only 91 hours (the alleged elapsed time of the Apollo 11 moon trip)? This would require an average speed of more than one million miles per hour for the spacecraft, a patently impossible feat by even the space scientists’ calculations.
>Another important reason why the manned moon landing must be a hoax is that, according to the Vedas, each planet has its particular standard of living and atmosphere, and no one can transfer from one planet to another without becoming properly qualified. This means that if someone wants to go to Mars, for instance, he has to give up his present gross material body and acquire another one suitable for life on that particular planet. Vedic knowledge teaches that the living being doesn’t die with the death of the body, but that he is an eternal spirit soul. As Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita, “As the embodied soul continually passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death” (Bhagavad-gita, 2.13). At the time of death the human being transfers to another material body according to the desires he cultivated and the work he performed during his lifetime. Therefore, since the moon has a particular standard of life and atmosphere, if one wants to travel there he has to adapt his material body to the conditions of that planet."
https://krishna.org/man-on-the-moon-a-colossal-hoax-that-cos...
Furthermore it's often suggested that the motion effect of moving in zero G was created by over-cranking the camera, but that's only possible with a film camera. Any stage involving film would have left frame marks, and effect like over-cranking on video tape wasn't possible until years later. Finally the best video technology of the time was from Japan, not the USA, so the US didn't have the technical capacity to develop specialist tech just for the landings. Even using much later tech from a decade or more later, the manipulations would be easily detectable nowadays in the recordings. Finally, they needed to use radio telescopes to receive the video transmission from the moon. They'd have needed a rig much bigger than the Apollo vehicles had to receive a video transmission from earth with enough bandwidth, to then re-transmit back.
A real-time faked video relayed from earth would have had very little manipulation or 'effects' to simulate low-G motion. That really just doesn't seem plausible, and again thousands of people would have had to have known about it and never talked.