All the mission were nearside. Apollo 11 went to Mare Tranquilitatis, Apollo 12 to Oceanus Procellarum, Apollo 13 was supposed to go to Fra Mauro, Apollo 14 went there instead, Apollo 15 went to the Hadley Apennine region, Apollo 16 went to Descartes and Apollo 17 went to the Taurus-Littrow valley. Jack Schmitt, scientist-astronaut of the '65 class who was LMP on 17, petitioned for a landing at the Tsiolkovsky mare crater on the far side. He proposed that Titan II rockets could be used to deploy relay satellites in Lunar orbit to allow communication. But budget cuts obviously threw that idea out the window.

All missions left behind a set of experiments. 12 onwards deployed the sophisticated Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package containing all sorts of goodies. This relayed data back to the mainplanet for years afterwards, far longer than expected. I believe all five ALSEPs were still operational when budget cuts caused the ALSEP office to be shut down. All other equipment that was not required for the return journey was left behind.

This has been discussed a lot. More expert people can give you numbers but the simple truth is that no current telescope is capable of the required resolution. There is also the issue that no-one is prepared to waste valuable time on such a pointless exercise. The Rusty Lander once made a similar proposal here.

Correct. To assume so would be a fallacy of composition.

All Hassleblad photography was on film.

Firstly, the solar radiation is always exaggerated by conspiracists. It didn't pose any serious threat to the integrity of the film. Secondly, this scenario has been suggested, but no-one has produced any direct evidence to support it. It is essentially grabbing at straws.

With the STS 107 disaster, this obviously gets more weight. It is frankly disgusting that conspiracists would capitalise on such a tragedy to further then bilking.

It is also a very poor way of making a point. The Space Shuttle is designed for a certain purpose and to do things a certain way. Because NASA may run into trouble accomplishing that, it doesn't mean to say that different spacecraft doing things a different way for different purposes can't work. This is pure handwaving, a thing that we on this board find pathetic. It is the job of the conspiracists to demonstrate directly that the technology developed for the task was incapable of doing it. The fact that conspiracists must resort to such handwaving says a lot about how much they actually know about what they're talking about.

Indeed. There are some that suggest that Apollo 11 was faked and that the rest were real. This is a rather cowardly standpoint to take. It seems like the view of someone who doesn't have to courage to stand on one side of the fence, he tries to compromise. Of course, such a scenario is implausible. Those who actually know how the program works will know that each mission built on the one before. Apollo 11 was the manned qualification of the LM on the Lunar surface. It was part of the development. The idea that real Apollo began with fully functional selenogical missions is to demonstrate ignorance of the program. I discussed the procedure of development here.