Another weak point in the Moon hoax hypothesis is: why would the Soviets go along with it? Their intelligence surely would find good evidence that it was all staged.
You are correct: being the leaders of space industry, the Soviets well appreciated the technical impossibilities and knew straightaway that the Moon Landings were a hoax. They immediately set out to blackmail the US and benefit from it.
When Apollo 13 was launched, its empty boilerplate module didn’t even reach outer space and fell off in the North Atlantic. The Soviets calculated its trajectory and picked it up off the Azores Islands aboard a November-class nuclear submarine.
They then used the empty boilerplate to blackmail the Americans. They made a deal, guaranteed by the presence of Hungarian officials, and handed back the empty capsule to US icebreaker “Southwind” in Murmansk, in Sept 1970.
https://www.aulis.com/odyssey_apollo.htm
In exchange for the empty capsule and for its silence, the USSR negotiated and obtained large economic advantages from the US: loans and funding, grain exports, outsourced factories of truck manufacturing and food production and much more.
The blackmail succeeded, but as time passed, the Soviet leaders found themselves as trapped by the lie as the Americans. While benefitting from the hoax and secretly cosying to the US, they kept demanding immense sacrifices to the USSR populations in order to confront the purported Cold War foe. After a while, it became impossible to expose the US without exposing themselves.
The new Russian leadership has however broken up with this cover up policy. Two years ago, state-owned Russian channel RT in Arabic language has broadcast a four-part documentary featuring professor Alexander Popov, PhD in Physics and Mathematics, an academic who wrote a book exposing NASA’s faux Moon landing. He exposed the lie, but also why the USSR was complicit with it.
So it is clear what the Russian position now is regarding the Moon Landing Hoax. They have already started informing the Arabic-speaking public; only the threat of losing their broadcasting licences is stopping them from airing the documentary in European languages.
Personally, I don’t care so much about the Moon Landing Hoax, which is a benign, even funny fakery, and didn’t really harm anybody except the US taxpayer pocket.
But I can’t wait for the day when Russian TV channels will expose the truth about the 9/11 false flag and crime against humanity. By doing so, they will expose the Israeli evil masterminds and hopefully trigger a reaction within America, for the country to wake up and recover its sovereignty from the Zionist occupiers.
https://www.unz.com/audio/kbarrett_sterling-harwood-on-moon-landing-controversy/#comment-4623023
Imagine the Russian TV showing the lies of the holocaust. Oy vey, that would be a diaster.
Can't trust the commies, except about the holocaust and finding Hitler's remains.
And this is why the the fully subverted MSM loves to push the Russian Boogeyman fairy tale.
The Russians were the first to send a rover to the moon. They used it to place the famous "laser reflector" there, which is often touted as evidence of humans having been there.
Having said that, there is doubt as whether the reflectors have ever even actually been used. I'm refering to a non-hoaxer study that was done in the interest of checking if the reflectors were still functional or not, or if reflected lasers were just bouncing off the bare surface. The study proved that the only time that the "signal strength" of the reflected laser matched what was expected from bouncing off the reflector on the moon, and not just the surface itself, was the first time the Russians did it using their reflector, which was in the mid 60's. All other recorded times, the signal is equivalent to having just bounced off the surface itself.
The study concluded that the reflectors are likely busted or covered by regolith; but an equally valid interpretation is that they've never been used at all, except maybe that first time by the Russians. So how do we know they are there at all, except for that first soviet use of them. And can that first result be trusted?
So to answer your question, I don't know :D
It is a game of the cabals, they all go along to fool the sheeple.