I must say the idea that "the 1969 landing was a fake, but we did go to the moon later" is a twist on the conspiracy theory I had not heard before this thread. It is a convenient modification of the original hoax claim that can be used to include more recent technology like laser ranging off the mirrors left on the moon, and the revisits by new moon probes sending back high resolution photos showing the HW previously left on the moon.
Of course, that twist adds another layer of extremely complicated hoax engineering that would need to be added to keep the hoax going. Now the later astronauts who *did* go to the moon would either have to be unaware the 1969 landing was fake, or they would have to be willing to live the rest of their lives knowing they really were first, but couldn't talk about it. The engineers who built the later moon shots would also have to be unaware they were the first, and they would not know why their designs had to be different than Apollo 11. Of course, since it takes months (or years in some cases) to build and test flight HW, they would have had to know well prior to the 1969 launch that the later flights needed to have different HW to actually work. I would be interested in exactly what was different about the later missions that allowed them to be possible, while the 1969 mission was not. For example, Ralph Rene claimed the Van Allen belt radiation made it impossible for the astronauts to survive travel to the moon. In order for that to be true, that means we have never been above low-Earth orbit, then or ever.
So, for the "not in 1969, but we did later" to be true, that means that many of the original hoax theories are wrong. The real conspiracy theorists would never accept that!
