Well, the Rambam held that the moon was not a physical entity, so if someone wanted to defend that position, he would have to say the whole thing was a hoax.
Forget the moon landings… that would have to mean that all the other moon missions that landed on the moon (i.e. the unmanned ones) as well as those in lunar orbit are ALL fakes (since you can’t land an object on a non-physical entity and the data the orbiters are gathering would obviously be false).
In addition, I don’t believe the Rambam’s statements are limited to the moon, but to all heavenly bodies (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). So the Mars rovers, the Voyager and Pioneer missions, the Cassini mission and on and on would have to be faked as well.
Thus we’re left with a number of possibilities:
1. The Rambam was wrong on this.
2. The entire enterprise of space exploration is a hoax, covering multiple nations in direct competition with each other and who would have loved to be able to prove the other side was faking an accomplishment (think back to the US/USSR space race)
3. The Rambam is not speaking b’pashtus.
4. Fill in your own possibility here.
I’ll leave it to you to decide which is the case.
The Wolf