ghly motivated individuals, attracted a following and turned into collaborative works. Although NASA does not control the editorial content of these works, they now sponsor their distribution on the Internet. They also provided very high quality digital scans of the original 70mm, 35mm and 16mm photographic images taken during the Apollo missions.
The Apollo record even includes certain documents that were originally classified CONFIDENTIAL, including transcripts of private crew conversations, medical data, and rocket performance reports. These all seem to have been declassified without any redactions.
The Apollo project is thus one of the most thoroughly documented events in history. The extensive record establishes the reality of the Apollo program beyond reasonable doubt, but ironically it fuels the Hoax Believers' purely negative strategy of attacking the record instead of presenting affirmative evidence for their case.
HBs are especially fond of the Apollo image archive. They try mightily to prove that this or that Apollo picture was faked or at least doctored. So far, they have succeeded only in finding artifacts accidentally added during scanning or copying and intentional changes to correct composition or exposure errors in the original picture.  These changes invariably disappear or are readily explained by merely going back to the originals. But in true HB fashion they claim this proves someone is trying to cover up the evidence! One simply can't win with them. In any event, the HBs have never demonstrated an actual case of anyone within NASA modifying an Apollo picture with an intent to deceive. However, this cannot be said about the HBs.
Yet even were the HBs to succeed in showing that some particular picture was created or modified with an intent to deceive, that's as far as it would go. That still wouldn't prove that no one ever landed on the moon. 
They avoid this at all costs because the HBs simply don't have such a story. Just as there are "young earth" creationists and "old earth" creationists, some Apollo HBs believe that none of the Apollo landings were real, while others believe that some were real and others were not. Some think the Apollo crews remained in earth orbit the whole time, others think they never went into space at all. There are as many stories as there are HBs. Perhaps more. (And a few UFO enthusiasts who stumble on the conversation by accident believe that Apollo was perfectly real but that NASA has been hiding the alien artifacts they discovered on the moon.)
Although my goal in this essay is not to refute every claim made by the HBs (other sites do this very well) I will discuss some of them for insight into the style of arguments that the HBs use and how and why they are logically fallacious.
The single most important and fundamental fallacy underlying the HB arguments is an improper assumption of where the burden of proof lies. They frequently challenge their critics to "prove" that Apollo was real, but it is really up to the HBs to prove their extraordinary contention that it was not real. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Why so? The answer can seem somewhat philosophical, but there are some very sound reasons for placing the burden of proof on the claimaint.
One very practical reason is just about anyone can make a wild and unsupported claim with relatively little effort, but painstakingly debunking even the most frivolous claims can take a lot of time and effort from experts. Quite frankly, most of them have better things to do.
But even this isn't enough of a reason; after all, once in a great while the generally accepted theory or principle is wrong and the seemingly wild-eyed outsider turns out to be right. It does seem a little unfair to handicap them against the whole scientific establishment.
But science does not seek fairness; science seeks the truth, and the rules have evolved to what they are over centuries because they have been shown to be the most effective way to get at the truth. For every Theory of Relativity that succeeds brilliantly there a