Reasoning pattern · logic
Moving the goalposts occurs when a claim survives disconfirmation by replacing the original standard of proof with a new, more demanding or different one after evidence is supplied.
A fair test states in advance what evidence would count for or against the claim. Continually changing the criterion prevents the claim from ever facing a meaningful test.
In practice
The staging claim conflicts with several independent evidence streams: third-party radio tracking, lunar samples studied outside NASA, hardware still used for lunar laser ranging, and later orbital images matching the recorded landing sites.