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 are hundreds of incorrect theories that fade into deserved obscurity. And some that don't fade simply because their authors don't know when to quit.
There is a more fundamental and philosophical reason for placing the burden of proof on the claimant: science can never actually "prove" anything. We can only disprove. We can find contradictions between the predictions of a theory and our empirical observations, and if the observations are correct then the theory must go or at least change. When a theory has has been found to be compatible with a very large amount of evidence, and if it makes predictions that can be tested with experiments that also produce consistent evidence, then it becomes established and accepted. But it is still in principle subject to being overturned by or at least modified in response to new evidence.
This brings out another fundamental property of every scientific theory: falsifiability. There must, at least in principle, be some experiment or evidence that could conceivably overturn the theory. If it is not possible to even conceive of a test that could overturn the theory, then it is simply not scientific though it may still be a perfectly good topic for philosophers or theologians. This issue can be seen in the way many HBs argue. Whenever you show them information generated by or about an Apollo mission, their near-instantaneous response is to say that it was faked. Rarely do they give any evidence to support their contention; they simply say that it could have been faked, therefore it cannot be used as evidence for the reality of Apollo. When you point out that they haven't shown any indications that the evidence was indeed faked, they respond that this is merely because the fakery is of very high quality. The problem, of course, is that a fake that is of such high quality that it cannot be distinguished in any way from the genuine article is a non-falsifiable claim. There is no answer, nothing that one could say to prove that the article or item is genuine and not a high quality fake 