Much as I hate to admit it, I’m old enough to remember watching the live television coverage in 1969 of Neil Armstrong stepping out of Apollo 11 and taking that first historic step on a new world stating, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
It was only 5 short years later that the conspiracy theories and claims that the moon landings were faked began to swirl. They’ve never been able to convince me that those trips to the moon didn’t happen and there are several solid reasons why not.
Moon rocks are one way we know the moon landings were real. Every scientist that has ever examined these rocks agrees their origin is non-terrestrial. The composition is distinctly different than that of any rock found on earth or from any other known celestial bodies. Some try to claim the rocks are from lunar meteorites but that cannot be true because it was the 1980s before the first lunar meteorite was discovered.
Another pertinent fact is that of the 400,000 people involved in the Apollo programs not one of them has claimed any of it was faked. That’s a huge number of people that would have to keep that secret. It is impossible to believe that not one of them would have given into greed and offered up some proof that all those moon landings were faked. If any one of them could have produced real evidence that those events did not occur, they would have been paid enormous amounts of money for the story.
And not only would those hundreds of thousands of people had to keep that secret once, but nine times. Why on earth would NASA go to all the trouble to do such an elaborate fake out nine times? Once would have been enough to convince the world, including the USA’s then archenemy the Soviet Union, that America had won the space race. Why go to all the expense and chicanery to do it over and over again?
Even the Soviet Union did not and does not dispute the facts and they would love to have something so monumental to use against the United States. Those are some facts you can use to dispute your buddies’ claims should the subject arise again.