Because anything which currently involves humans in tin cans in earth orbit happens below the van Allen Belts, which is one point the non-believers are holding up.
Their point being to cross the Belts in tin cans even going fast would have toasted them nicely and afterwards being toasted further by having no protection from cosmic rays or solar winds at all.
Which won't happen if you stay in LEO where every human space flight happened afterwards.
To return back to the current topic, there was a (good!) movie about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
from 1978 where they faked it to proactively saving face
in case of any real mishaps. Though that was for traveling to Mars, not the Moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
Their point being to cross the Belts in tin cans even going fast would have toasted them nicely and afterwards being toasted further by having no protection from cosmic rays or solar winds at all.
Which won't happen if you stay in LEO where every human space flight happened afterwards.
To return back to the current topic, there was a (good!) movie about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One from 1978 where they faked it to proactively saving face in case of any real mishaps. Though that was for traveling to Mars, not the Moon.