Or, Russia realized how utterly futile it was to spend all that money to do something impossible. Don't forget, this idea of actual space, planets and a spherical earth is just as important to the other powerful nations. If Russia was to rat out the US fake moon shots... it would harm the entire world space program.Money stops us from doing stuff all. the. time. If something costs to much in relation to our will to do it, we don't do it. There's a reason we don't have universal healthcare. Or a real high speed train line down the eastern seaboard. Our collective desire for those things doesn't outweigh the cost of those things.
We have had no real reason to go back to the moon for how much it costs. Doing so back in the 60s and 70s was primarily about competing with Russia*. We figured spending a ton of money was worth it to show up Russia and prove we are the technologically superior nation. Once we did it, and it was clear Russia wasn't going to try and keep up or exceed us, there was no competition anymore. So no will to spend that much money. So we took away funding and scrapped several planned missions. It wasn't worth the money. What money remained in the NASA budget was better spent on different projects.
*Something important here - it would have been obvious to Russia if we had faked the Apollo Mission. They'd have had no problem tracking the flights and easily could figure out that transmissions weren't coming from the moon. They'd have been shouting that from the rooftops.
If you don't think that NASA, the Russian space scientists, Japan's scientists, China and other scientists don't talk... every day... You are already naive.
As Red Green said "they're all in this together"
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