Americans were most certainly not on the Moon. The purpose of the Apollo missions was the calibrate ICBM guidance technology, namely, star-tracking technology. The idea was that if an ICBM could be fired toward the moon and could be made to travel 230,000 miles each way and still fall within a city-sized patch of ocean, then an ICBM could easily be made to hit a target with high accuracy.
If we had wanted to land a person on the Moon, many things would have been required which were not made available for the 1969 mission. You would need a booster rocket to escape lunar gravity comparable to the Saturn V; the lunar lander could not have possibly provided enough thrust to escape lunar gravity. The booster would have needed to land right-side-up much as the SpaceX rockets do when the boosters are re-used. This was no easy feat even in 2017. The space suits allegedly used by Armstrong and Aldrin would have needed to be lead-lined as the radiation beyond low-earth orbit would have been too extreme.
The visual artifacts associated with the fakery of Apollo-11 are plain to see in high-resolution footage used in the IMAX film Apollo 11, released in 2019. It was never anticipated that anyone would get access to such high-resolution images derived from the 35mm film. Virtually no one saw these images as most people had tiny monochromatic televisions which obfuscated any visual artifacts associated with the forgery.
The calibration of the new ICBMs could have been done in total secrecy but it was decided that they ought to create a cover for the calibration/tests of Minuteman III which distracted from the disastrous misadventure in Vietnam. I can remember in the 1990s growing up and hearing my father lamenting that the Apollo missions were suspended in 1972. I don't think he meant to pose a thought-provoking question, but he did quite by accident. He believed in the moon landing hoax and simply thought that it was an unnecessary wound to our national pride to suspend the missions. Of course, there was no reason to continue the missions as the calibration of the star-tracking technology used by Minuteman III had been completed and thus, its function had been served. The suspension of the moon missions was one of the best pieces of evidence of their being entirely fabricated. Traditionally, when there's a new frontier and someone takes the first steps, others follow. In the case of the Moon, no one did because landing a person on the moon was beyond the technological capacity of all parties involved, including the United States.
If you look closely at the Artemis mission, it's yet another fake. The purpose of this one is to stage hydrazine tanks in orbit so that X-37 doesn't need to land to refuel.
