Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory

One of the saddest things about the death of Neil Armstrong is that the conspiracy theorists are back out of their box again with their list of why we have never made it to the moon and it was all faked in a desert.
Listening to the conspiracy theorists on the radio, television and comments on the Internet, there seems to be few repeated lines of 'proof' that America fibbed about the whole thing, so let's ask the people who should know.

1 - The American flag appears to be flapping as if "in a breeze" in videos and photographs supposedly taken from the airless lunar surface.

Someone who should know is Spaceflight historian Roger Launius, of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. so how does he explain it? 'The video you see where the flag's moving is because the astronaut just placed it there, and the inertia from when they let go kept it moving'. This was put to the test by the Mythbusters team who placed a replica of the American flag planted on the moon into a vacuum chamber at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They first tested at normal pressure and manipulated the flag and the momentum moved the flag around but the motion quickly dissipated. In vacuum conditions, manipulating the flag caused it to flap vigorously as if it were being blown by a breeze.

2 - No stars are visible in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.

Answer that Phil Plait of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. 'All manned landings happened during the lunar daytime thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the moon'. Oh, okay then.

3 - The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if made in wet sand.

The lack of wind on the moon means the footprints in fine, dry lunar dust aren’t blown away in the way they would be if made in a similar substance on Earth as explained by the clever chaps at the Marshall Space Flight Center when the Mythbusters team tested whether dry or wet sand made a more distinguishable footprint by stepping in them with an astronaut boot. It was clear that the wet footprint had more detail than the dry footprint. They then placed sand similar in composition to the soil on the Moon in a vacuum chamber and stepped on it with an astronaut boot, which made a clear print.

4 - The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt.

The paper 'Review of Particle Properties' from the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory state that due to the speed Apollo was travelling and as they passed through the narrowest part of the radiation belt, passage took about 5 min during which time the astronauts would have received a maximum of 50 mSv which would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill.

5 - Why have we not attempted a moon landing since 1972? It proves it never went there in the first place because it is just too difficult.

I'll take this one, beating the Soviet Union to the moon was always the main goal of the Apollo program but sending men to the moon is costly, the moon landing cost $24 billion and with the Space War won, which was the whole point, pressure to spend elsewhere curtailed any further moon landings after Apollo 17.

That's me convinced then, all that evidence and debunking of the conspiracy theories should force the last few lingering doubters to slink off quietly but it's unlikely, even when faced with photographs which show the Apollo landing sites complete with flag, footprints, buggy tracks, scientific equipment and even the lunar descent stage. Oh well, it would be boring if we all believed the same thing wouldn't it.