>>21409067They just burned the Apollo 1 crew to death on the launchpad two years previous. The landing and re-orbit/rendezvous is the riskiest part by far, 99% of all things that could potentially go wrong are in that phase, because there's so many more things that could go wrong compared to every other part of the mission.
Crashing the crew into the surface of the moon, or worse yet stranding them with the entire world watching live would have been beyond catastrophic, way worse than getting caught faking it.
Even if they had all the technology to go ahead with the landing, which I think they did, they still faked Apollo 11.
