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