PART TWO: THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM SCENARIO
At the other end of the spectrum we consider the possibility that only a few top people at NASA knew of the conspiracy. And so all of the contractors and most of the folks working at NASA truly believed the lunar landing was a fact.
This has two advantages. First, it is well known that the probability of keeping a secret diminishes rapidly as the number of people who know the secret increases even slightly. So by keeping this number to an absolute minimum you'll reduce the number of people who can spill the beans. Second, the NASA employees and contractors will go to their graves staunchly asserting that NASA did what it said it did.
The big disadvantage is that the contractors now believe they must actually build the space hardware. Grumman must actually believe it is building a lunar lander, North American must actually build a command module, Boeing and others must actually believe they are building a moon-capable rocket. Integration teams from all these companies must make the products work together. Quality control officers from NASA must meticulously inspect the work.
These engineers are not dummies. The whole reason NASA hires them to build its spaceships is because they have the expertise to do it. And so when NASA tells Grumman to build a lunar lander, it knows that Grumman engineers are going to go out and discover for themselves just what problems are involved in landing on the moon, and then proceed to solve them. If NASA executives are bent on fooling everyone then they couldn't care less if Grumman succeeds. But Grumman would care. And the NASA quality control people would care. If Grumman falls short, Grumman will know it, and so will the NASA employees who inspect the work.
In short, this scenario will produce equipment capable of going to the moon. But our cardinal premise is that NASA couldn't do it. So if the equipment worked, then what was to prevent NASA from actually performing a lunar landing? Remember, the most airtight scam is the one that's not really a scam. If they wanted people to believe they had landed a man on the moon, and they had the machinery to do it, the smart thing to do would be to actually accomplish the landing.
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Acknowledgement goes to clavius.org and I copy the Conspiracy Scale section here verbatum so as not to plagiarise. The Clavius site is a dream compendium of intelligent debunking of moon landing conspiracy theorists opinions. They debunk the conspiracists opinions that a giant hoax was perpetrated on the US citizens and the rest of the world. Please go there and read the site end to end. It will clarify any rash thought you might have about the 20th July 1969 and the following five moon landings being a hoax.