All that is addressed in these two posts.
Do a page search on "Soviets" here and start looking at the info there.
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4001964&postcount=1
http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4731597&postcount=1090
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/moon.htm
(excerpt)
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Several motives have been suggested for the U.S. government to fake the moon landings - some of the recurrent elements are:
Distraction - The U.S. government benefited from a popular distraction to take attention away from the Vietnam war. Lunar activities did abruptly stop, with planned missions cancelled, around the same time that the US ceased its involvement in the Vietnam War.
Cold War Prestige - The U.S. government considered it vital that the U.S. win the space race with the USSR. Going to the Moon, if it was possible, would have been risky and expensive. It would have been much easier to fake the landing, thereby ensuring success.
Money - NASA raised approximately 30 billion dollars pretending to go to the moon. This could have been used to pay off a large number of people, providing significant motivation for complicity. In variations of this theory, the space industry is characterized as a political economy, much like the military industrial complex, creating fertile ground for its own survival.
Risk - The available technology at the time was such that there was a good chance that the landing might fail if genuinely attempted.
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