This came to mind recently. How can a space travel conspiracy make profits off of faked space travel (funded by the government, presumably) when the cost in men and money are staggering for such an 'obvious' lie.
There's an endpoint to how much the government can afford, even if they all are working together. (Sidenote: if they are all secretly together, why is America 3 trillion in debt? hey can't balance a damn budget, do you really think they're capable of pulling everything else off? Plus 21 billion of that is to china, if they're in cahoots, it makes no sense.)
Firstly, manpower. A lot have people have died, namely during the space race, and the 'height of the conspiracy'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidentsSurely with several witnesses and detailed descriptions of most of those pertaining to launch failure, (and records of those in the cosmos, whether or not you'll accept them) they couldn't
all be faked for the conspiracy, surely. if they wanted to seem successful, wouldn't they want to, you know, not kill their people doing the thing that they said they can do well?
Also, money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_programThe space shuttle program alone cost 209 billion, and our toys have only gotten fancier and more expensive.
If the government is swindling taxpayers out of that much money, you've got to wonder, how? And more importantly why?
From what I've heard so far, the motivators were greed and looking powerful.
That's a hefty pricetag for illusions.
Edit: Also, how exactly does one keep all that flagrant spending under wraps in a company of NASA's size, not to mention every space program everywhere?