Eddie,
Absolutely.
India, USA, USSR, japan, China, have all sent spacecraft to the moon. USSR and USa have landed spacecraft on the moon. USA have landed 12 astronauts on the moon.
When USA and USSR went to the moon, a high school in the UK, Kettering Grammar School, monitored radio signals from the spacecraft. With weak radio signals you know where they are coming from - if the antenna's not pointed right you don't get any signal.
Thousands of amateur astronomers and amateur radio enthusiasts have spent probably hundreds of thousands or even millions of person-hours monitoring spacecraft in orbit and beyond.
There are retroreflectors on the moon, placed there by the astronauts and by robot in the USSR case. Not easy to power a laser that can travel 380,000km but anyone rich enough could do the experiment and get a signal bounce back from those reflectors. A number of observatories do this experiment to track the exact Earth-Moon distance much more accurately than doing it by radar.
Science is a continual progression. Before WW2, individuals in different countries started building rockets. In WW2, these were developed as weapons of war. After WW2 the same. However, they were also developed by USSR and USA to send objects and people into orbit.
When the USA and USSR were sworn enemies, they used radar to track where the other one was sending spacecraft. They were definitely trying to keep the other one honest.
Have you ever looked on the App that tells you where the International Space Station is? I did last year when it was flying over Sydney. I went outside and saw it. It's travelling pretty fast but there are dozens of commercial satellites that can all be tracked via apps or websites and seen with binoculars.
What are they doing up there, if they are not in actual orbit around the Earth?
There is a huge consistent body of evidence that science has done all of these things. The Flat-Earth people don't do any experiments or if they do they do them badly. They either misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent science. All of the experiments I listed can be done by ANYONE with a bit of brains and effort and have been done hundreds of times in human history.
I think the fact that a Tesla roadster is heading out into space towards the asteroid belt is a testament to human engineering and humour.
I understand that people are mistrustful of authority. That's as it should be. But it is the economically and politically powerful where the mistrust should be directed and called to account - after all, we might be many clans but we are one tribe and so far we only have this one rock that we all have to share so why not be nice about it and share it well? Maths tells us that all modern Europeans have a common ancestor from no more than about 1,000 years ago. So most of you are my distant cousins.
Science over the long term is nothing more than a directed, logical search of truth and understanding of physical reality. Almost anyone can do science. Almost anyone can be an amateur astronomer.
The SpaceX pictures certainly look unusual. Space looks so friggin empty! But there's no atmosphere so of course the colours will look a bit different. The reason the Hubble Telescope gets way better (sharper) pictures than Earth-based telescopes is because there is no atmosphere, no dust particles etc to get in the way. Also, if the camera's catching any sunlight at all then stars will not be bright enough to see (we don't see stars on Earth during daytime).
In the SpaceX LiveStream it was often hard to see clearly because of sunlight swamping the camera. Again, of course that's going to happen and should be expected. The spacecraft is slowly rotating so the view keeps changing. I think Musk's point was if he wanted to fake it, it would have looked more like a Hollywood movie.
edit:
The anti-moon landing people have had decades to work on their theories.
Here's an idea - they could have spent that time working out how to do range-finding on rocket launches.
All rockets send radio telemetry to the ground. The conspiracy theorists could get their own radio receivers and triangulate the rocket. Or they could use optical methods. Whatever - they could do actual tests if they really wanted to.
They could determine the rocket speed. If that speed exceeds escape velocity then that means the rocket is definitely leaving the planet.
They have had decades to work on this. Why haven't they done it? They could have actual proof whether or not rockets are going as fast as the space companies claim.
Wikipedia lists several independent confirmations of the moon missions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-..._Moon_landings
LuT, I apologise if you feel I have misquoted you. We can discuss this in the forum or PM if you wish.