 was fraudulent.
Despite the false dichotomy implicit in their negative argumentation, HBs readily concede that hoaxing the moon landings would be by far the largest, most elaborate and the most successful hoax in human history. Yet the notion that a hoax so huge could remain totally airtight for four decades is simply beyond credulity. Nothing else even comes close. Known conspiracies and hoaxes on a far smaller scale have repeatedly fallen apart in far less than 40 years. The Watergate break-in and related Presidential wrongdoing was revealed within a year of its occurrence. President Nixon was forced to resign after only about two years. The Iran-Contra scandal came to light only about a year after the fact. Some Apollo HBs repeatedly stress the huge scale of the alleged Apollo hoax to stroke their own egos at having "cracked" something so important without realizing that they are merely underscoring its implausibility.
Space telecommunications was one of the things that inspired me to get into ham radio (I was first licensed in 1971), earn two college degrees in electrical engineering (Cornell University in 1978 and Carnegie Mellon University in 1979), and ultimately a rewarding career in the communications and computer field.
To show the scope of the communication systems used by Apollo (and how far we've already come since those days) I'm putting together some link budgets for a few Apollo missions. A "link budget" is an accounting, generally done on a spreadsheet, of the signal and noise powers on a communications link. It starts with the radio frequency (RF) power generated at the transmitter and computes how much of it reaches the receiver input over the specified distance with the particular transmission lines and antennas at each end.
The link budget separately computes the equivalent noise level at the receiver input from a variety of sources including the receiving equipment, the antenna, various celestial sources and even the cosmic background from the Big Bang. It then compares the two to produce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
The bottom line is the link margin - the difference between the actual SNR and the minimum required for the particular modulation type and information being sent. A positive link margin indicates a working link; a negative margin indicates that the link is not working.
These are Excel spreadsheet files; they can also be read by Open Office and Neo Office, among other 3rd party spreadsheet programs.
In my opinion, the single best such site and the one to check out first is Moon Base Clavius, organized by Jay Windley. Another is by Phil Plait, the self-described Bad Astronomer; he was spurred to action by the appalling Fox TV "documentary" Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land On The Moon?.
Youtube has a 9-part video of a 2007 talk by Peter Barrett of the Canberra (Australia) Skeptics titled Why The Moon Hoax Makes No Sense. He also has an excellent list of questions to test conspiracy theories that apply quite generally, not just to the Apollo hoax conspiracy theory.
 We saw the HBers curious "logic" in action with a recent news story that a "moon rock" given to a Dutch museum by a former Dutch government official was actually a piece of petrified wood. Some HBs claimed, apparently seriously, this proved Apollo wasn't real. Of course, it only proves that this particular "rock" wasn't genuine; NASA still has hundreds of kg of real moon rocks brought back by Apollo, and countless scientists around the world have studied them. NASA's role is scientific research and science education, not supplying a collectibles market, so they do not give them away as trophies. But many individual collectors would certainly like to own a moon rock. Because they are not generally available, some have gone as far as stealing them from laboratories. It is not at all implausible that an especially dishonest individual might steal a real moon rock and replace it with a fake, or simply sell a fake moon rock to a collector with more dollars than sense. Obviously there wouldn't even be a demand for them if no one th