My 8th graders have determined that you are using the Burden of Proof logical fallacy.
I humbly disagree with your 8th graders.
NASA are claiming they have landed on the moon. It’s a pretty extraordinary claim and the burden of proof is on them.
BUT, what SeaCritique is doing is operating in the sceptical context. More info here:
http://theconversation.com/how-to-reason-with-flat-earthers-it-may-not-help-though-95160How do we know they went to the moon?
Well, 12 astronauts walked on the moon, most of them are still alive and none have ever confessed to fakery.
Ok, but they all could be lying as could all the people in mission control etc (although I guess those people could have been fooled, they might not have had to be “in on it”.)
But the whole thing is all on film, we have countless photos, hours of film footage of the Apollo missions.
But those could all be fake (you then get into sub arguments about shadow angles, flapping flags etc).
But they brought back lots of samples of moon rock.
Those could be from anywhere (from what I understand the rocks being on the moon and so in a vacuum for billions of years does actually make them distinct from earth rock, but that’s beyond my knowledge)
But the Russians were tracking them and they never called the Americans out on the fakery.
Maybe they were fooled too, or they knew that exposing the US would implicate themselves and their own fake space programs.
We could go on and on. The amateurs who tracked the Apollo missions, the fact Australia relayed signals to the moon, that recent missions launched by other counties have produced photos at high enough resolutions to see the original landing sites - the tracks of the lunar rover are clearly visible.
Every piece of evidence can be dismissed as fake or wrong or whatever.
If you operate in the sceptical context then you can refuse to believe anything which doesn’t fit your world view. FE does this with the moon landings and have to extend it to satellites and all space travel despite the number of people, countries and private countries involved and the fact that the technologies which use satellites demonstrably work.
The FE trick is to operate in this context selectively. Notice how things which purport to show a flat earth are accepted unquestioningly, when things do not it’s back to the sceptical context and the burden of proof is turned up to a level impossible to satisfy.
So while I do thing NASA has the burden of proof, they have more than met it to any reasonable strandard. If you call any evidence which doesn’t fit your world view wrong or fake then you can dismiss anything. For some people that’s easier than changing their beliefs.