Moon Landing: Fake or Real?

[Anomalocaris]

..and yet here we are, still busy trying to reverse engineer them...nearly half a decade after we got them to work in the first place. It's no small problem, though I can understand how we might like to think it is. The immensity of the issue lies bare and plain in our inability to reproduce them (and we have been trying). Planning a cruise down to the detail and then -losing the boat- is a big problem. Imagine yourself on the shores of a beautiful tropical island, pockets full of money, grand plans...no dinghy.

What we are trying to do is hardly just reverse engineering Apollo. What we are trying to do is to gold plate, no, diamond plate, Apollo, while on a budget.

Also, the whole exercise of manned space flight is 85% about prestige. We would suffer the loss of a considerable amount of presitge we would otherwise gain if our manned space program is seen as nothing more than resurrecting discarded 1970s technology. So even if our budget does not stretch beyond renovating Apollo, we must be seen to have diamond plated Apollo so much that we can say with a straight face "it is state of the art".