I'm very much in line with what you've written. Here is something I wrote on it a while ago but never posted. I think it is still a possibility as it does help to explain a few things that seem a little odd to me, but as I haven't yet learned enough about them to properly understand whether they're normal and expected I just tried to formulate something that seemed plausible to account for them until I acquire more knowledge on the matters. (*Edited a sentence. I should have re-read what I had written before pasting it and hitting send, or re-written it all over again to be up to date with what my current thoughts on the topic are.) --- I believe that it did happen, but that the first landing actually occurred quite some time before the 'live' broadcast to the public. What was shown to the public was not fully 'live', but was instead a combination of live participants (actors, directors, controllers) following a script and fake interacting with both original landing footage, the ongoing live landing, and also with footage of re-created scenes to help with blending and selling the production as occurring perfectly and as planned. The United States government couldn't afford for the event to be anything short of absolutely perfect, let alone risk it being unsuccessful, due to the political world climate at the time. They needed it to be successful and for this success to be seen by the world as having occurred perfectly as planned and without issues. Can you imagine the world watching the astronauts suffocating live on air due to a pinhole leak in a seal, or as they burned alive in a cabin fire (as happened during testing of the module and which demanded a total redesign)? A total failure being broadcast live and to the whole world would have been extremely detrimental to the status and power of the United States government and its military on the world stage, as well as damaging to the US citizenry's view of their government and their nation's power and status. It was also an event of great national pride that it was the United States that took this step for all mankind. If the US got egg on its face in front of the whole world right when nations were barely restrained from going to war, who knows what might have come about as a result. - It was likely a controlled and scripted presentation with a mix of pre-recorded footage from when the successful landing actually did occur combined with some live footage as well as re-created and custom-scripted scenes. - As it was likely live elements synced in with the pieces of edited recordings, perhaps aspects of the original footage couldn't be shown, or aspects might not have occurred ideally, or possibly that some scenes would require scripting and had to be re-created via a 'set' like a movie in order to re-create some scenes as they wanted them to be presented. This would also explain the Kubrick connection, as well as the inconsistencies of why some footage seems to have elements that are out of place or inconsistent with what would be expected in reality, while most of the other footage does have those elements behaving as would be expected in reality. - I doubt that they would have been able to rehearse most or even much of it at all beforehand, so it likely required controllers and directors for instructing the participants of when to make responses or to ask certain questions in order to keep timing and syncing between the live actions of participants, the actual landing footage, and re-created footage. (such as there being background voices in some recordings counting down/up for when to respond to a live question to try to simulate and account for distance and signal delay, etc.) - With a mixture of original footage and re-created footage being interacted with by live participants with a script, directors and controllers, it would have appeared much like it did. You could imagine it as a sort of stage play with actors who interact with a recording on a TV (or even think Jurassic Park with "John Hammond" interacting with the recording of himself on the screen).