Does it matter? Well there are other things that matter more. Things matter to the degree that the consequences of being wrong can foul you up...
Collins closes his video by addressing the question. I'll quote part of his answer.
Why does any of this matter? My concern is with the ultimate fate of knowing, of seeing the difference between what you can know and what you wish for, because that's what puts the sapiens in homo sapiens. Otherwise your just another homo. The urge to believe drives people to trade in a part of their soul for the comfort of being a rebel. But that step from knowing you have been lied to, to believing everything else is a lie is a big step.
Collins doesn't stop there.
Still there is something to it, this matter of "what you can know and what you wish for".
Lots of things matter. For instance you have children and someone tells you that you should not vaccinate them. How are you going to sort out what to do? Years ago protesters stopped a nuclear power plant in the state of New York from being operated after it had been fully constructed and paid for. Was that a good thing?
For me the question of how to sort things out, of how to stop from being snowed matters a lot. As far as the moon hoax question goes it matters in ways that are both tangential and direct.
In 1920 a New York Times writer mocked Robert Goddard for holding that rockets could travel in a vacuum.
That Professor Goddard, with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react -- to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
Don't you just love the scare quotes for his 'chair', with the implicit notion that it was unworthy of the respect they so conspicuously failed to give. On the eve of the first moon landing, 17 July 1969, the Times issued a correction. That correction was issued more than 23 years after Goddard's death. That 1920 article as well as other attacks on Goddard in the press prove that a contempt for scientists, intellectuals, and the support given to their efforts is by no means a new thing.
That matters. That matters more than you might know.
