There's plenty of evidence that at least the videos they show us of the astronauts on the moon are fraudulent.

Well let's go one by one. You give me a link to a piece of video to analyze. I'll view it and see if I agree as to its fishiness. I'll also check up on what debunkers say about it.

Again, I don't have a hard science background (hence the thread title), so I can only go by what is more reasonable, equally reasonable, and less reasonable.

There's lots of evidence.
You should watch Jay Weidner's film, "Kubrick's Odyssey."
Kubrick had a very intimate relationship with NASA.
Weidner even explains the camera and the Scotchlite front-screen projection technology used to create the "moon" sets.

I'll take a look at this in the near future.

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Has "the near future" happened yet?

Still smarting from my thorough dismantling of Kaysing? Or was it my linking to that great evisceration of you by claudel?

AFAIK I have to shell out $3 to watch the Kubrick video. Hey Smedley, could you just relate to me the points made in the video?

How about the interview talking about how NASA "destroyed" the technology to go to the Moon, and now they have to re-discover it? They also put forth "travelling through the Van Allen Belts" as another obstacle they need to overcome.

Really?

How does any science type perform the mental gymnastics necessary to swallow THAT whopper? I mean, give me a break!

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For someone to believe that line of bull they would have to be oblivious to how engineering and the sciences work. There are people still alive today who worked on the space program, and everyone who did, shared his experience with other fellow scientists. Many of them were sworn to secrecy, true, and there is a limiting effect there, but when they get together and share stories without snoopers listening in, they continue the knowledge and it gets carried on. There is no way that discoveries in radiation shielding technology or so-called air conditioning of space suits or silver-zinc batteries or applications with emulsion film cameras on the lunar surface or fuel efficiency for half-million mile lunar space flights would have been entirely forgotten by those who built the system.

I read this on apollohoax.net in response to the issue of missing telemetry data.

This argument presumes that NASA should have curated the tapes in the certain way the conspiracy theorists impose.  That imposition is based on erroneous notions such as the telemetry tapes being the "original" records of the mission, especially of the television coverage.  The process of converting the embedded television signal to a standard signal, such that it could be playable by ordinary video equipment, was accomplished "on the fly" during the mission by highly specialized, custom-built equipment.  The telemetry tapes were retained temporarily only against the possibility that such an on-the-fly conversion would have failed.  Reading the tapes themselves requires large, finicky equipment, only one example of which has survived.  While the telemetry tapes are the original recordings, they are not the primary source of data, nor an especially useful source.  Only in very recent years have new techniques arisen to glean more from them than the original plan called for.

They are also very large.  Each tape is the size of a trash-can lid and records only 15 minutes worth of telemetry.  They are very expensive and very bulky to store.  And in the early 1970s they were also quite rare.  Memorex, the company that supplied the original tapes, used whale oil in the binder.  With the advent of the Endangered Species Act, they were called upon to find a more environmentally responsible method.  They were not able to do it in time, and NASA was forced to re-use Apollo tapes for ongoing missions.  They did not explicitly use the Apollo 11 tapes, but the tapes were not labeled in a way that made it easy for technicians to identify them in time.

In short, the claim that NASA somehow intentionally destroyed the original records of Apollo 11 is ludicrous.  The telemetry tapes themselves were useful only so that data could be extracted from them later, which was done.  The data they contained is safe.  The telemetry recordings themselves are a red herring.

Unconvincing?

Weidner says Kubrick was given a "deal with the devil" in 1962 after the Pentagon saw Dr. Strangelove.

He could not refuse. Once the deal was offered, it was his death sentence.

He was given an unlimited budget for 2001, and latitude and money to make any films he wanted for the rest of his life, if he would shoot the "moon landings. "

The two projects were  shot concurrently at Pinewood Studios in England.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Weidner where he discusses Kubrick's moon landings and the fact that Kubrick tells the story in The Shining. 

Here's the link to part 2 of Weidner's "Kubrick's Odyssey":

Fixed link