Hello, Dwight. I wouldn't say you're stupid. There are many folks who agree that giving the hoax proponents the time of day gives them too much credence. That is NASA's official policy. Witness the flap in the media when it was announced that the Public Affairs Office was going to fund Jim Oberg to write a book on the topic - the national news made it seem like NASA was flushing money down the toilet, and NASA quickly reversed direction and cancelled the deal.

You are right to question the ease of pulling off a conspiracy, and the scale of which it would require. The conspiracists never bother to try to craft an explanation that accounts for those details.

And you're definitely right to question how such an unorthodox position gets any mainstream attention whatsoever. Understanding that process can give a lot of insight on how many concepts and ideas get far more legitimacy than they deserve out of the media and society.

As for why we here do it, consider this. You were a child in the 1970s, when Apollo had just happened and was the epitome of technology. That was the era of the Cold War. There are plenty of adults and near adults today that grew up in the '80s and even into the '90s. Their cultural worldview was shaped by different factors, when the reality of Apollo was masked in the past, as ancient as WWII and WWI (they weren't the same thing? :roll Space to them was the Shuttle, near Earth orbit only, and the moon once again unreachable. They grew up with Challenger and NASA as the screw up more interested in beauracracy and empire building than safety and technical achievement. They grew up with remote controls and cable and satellite television, computers becoming a mainstay in every household, the spread and inundation of the web to everyday life. To them, high-tech is MP3s and a cellular phone that fits in a pocket. Their idea of computer technology is Windows and MS Word. So when they hear that maybe NASA faked Apollo for publicity, that seems plausible to them, when they hear about things like Watergate as a near-contemporary event (certainly from their perspective), and hear such fun things on a daily basis as WhiteWater, investigation of Clinton for out-of-wedlock nookie, Enron and the like, etc. And then see such amazing special effects on TV shows, much less feature movies, it becomes easy to believe it was fakable and maybe more fakable than doable. Add in the technical problems described by the conspiracists that they don't have the technical training to understand the errors of, and the lack of inundation with the details of the Apollo hardware and missions, and you have a ripe breeding ground for acceptance of the possibility.

Thus you have those of us who know better trying to provide a counter to the tide of irrationality. That's the motivation for postings like this board, that address the real technical situation and address the claims factually and logically and scientifically. We are doing the job of providing the rebuttal that the hoax claimants state is missing. One of their arguments is that nobody can give them the answers or will respond to their claims. Well, we do. And to the uncommitted fence-sitter looking at the claims trying to make sense of them, we provide the hard part (finding the information).