You’d still need to actualy launch a rocket that can reatch the moon.

You’d still need to put the 3 men in that rocket.

As there are lots of peoples able to follow you with telescopes, you actualy need to travel to the moon. Enter lunar orbit and come back. 10′s of 1000′s of amateurs all around the planet did follow each flights from beggining to end.

You just can’t fake the re-entry and touch down.

You’d need very extensive, and secret, studios.
You’d then need to pay crack studio teams and top knotchg actors. You’d need to pay them some prety generous extra to ensure secrecy.

Next, you need to do the special effects. In that time, special effects where exedingly dostly AND time consuming.
Here, again, the special effect specialists need some extra pay to ensure secrecy.

All in all, it would have been more dificult and cost a LOT more (probably about 10 times more…) to fake the moon missions than to actualy go to the moon, perform the landings and ground exploration and come back.

Nobody had the guts, yet. Or not recorded at least.

Mach -1 flyby past the Air Boss was accomplished on movie, but nobody ever tried night carrier landing while boozed, not even on comedy. Again not to interwebs notice.

There are rumors that some Astronauts took off in the Shuttle while s***faced, though. I know I would if I was strapped to a controlled small-nuclear-blast amount of fuel.

On the other hand, Navy pilots train so hard that they outta be able to do it, red-nosed or not.

Now, that other kludge, the *air filter* is also here on this site, somewhere. It was linked it to a site that contained reports of Astronauts using duct tape practically everywhere.
From removing moon dust, so a second piece of tape would stick, to anchoring loose food bags inside the ship, they used it plenty of times. It was included on their carry-on bags, and explicitly included in the hand luggage instructions, after they found plenty of uses for it on the previous occasions. It was then mandatory to carry a 25ft roll of tape along.

Now, that fender-map is in a museum, with good reason. I vote for a permanent list of EPIC KLUDGES.

1- Apolo-13 air filter. Both real and fictional.

2- Alien 8th passenger’s flamethrower, grenade launcher, automatic rifle, all rolled into one with duct tape. Fictional, of course. But it could be real too.

3- Behind Enemy Lines. Re-activating the homing beacon on your ejected seat, and only you can do it? FTW. Fictional. Probably real, ask the Navy.

4- Rambo, a red hot knife (not), a burning stick, and the contents of a 7.62mm NATO round. Cauterizing FTW. Fictional.

5- Myles Dyson, Terminator 2. Complete bandage of bullet wound using just Dyson’s clothes and a towel (perhaps? what else?)

keep going.

Assume nothing! Expect anything!

Oh, hell. What ain’t??

RogerThePunk :
Yeah, and with a decent high powered telescope on a clear night you can actually see all the fake rover tracks that we planted on the moon surface for all the fake moon landings that we faked over and over just to cover our tracks and prove that it was all for real…. and not fake.

There’s no telescope either on Earth or in our orbit that can resolve those things. Only recently did we get a robotic imager to the Moon that could actually image Apollo’s landing site, lunar rover tracks, etc.