To intentionally splice actual news footage in a way that makes it look like they're saying something else - something supporting this nonsense requires that they knew what actually happened and simply ignored it. This is purposeful misinformation, not ignorance. Thousands of kids will grow up not understanding one of the crowning achievements of humanity as a result - all for what, so they can watch a bad sequel to a terrible movie (I'm not talking about the first one, I own the first one)?
It irks me even more that they've been doing this all along. In the first movie they claim that NASA JPL "crashed" the beagle "rover" on Mars (but it was a cover up). The beagle LANDER, wasn't a rover, and it wasn't NASA, it was the European Space Agency. And then there's Megan Fox's little speech about bumblebee's engine...
What's the goal here? To make sure kids today are as stupid as possible so that they'll keep watching Michael Bay movies? It takes 5 seconds to come up with a real credible scenario for this movie. They could claim that this happened on Apollo 8. Lovell's crew went down to the lunar surface while they were on the far side and examined the crash site, came back up, and nobody knew. It even has the benefit of claiming Lovell was the first man on the moon but nobody knows about it.
That's actually somewhat plausible, and it works with the plot - but no, we can't do that, we have to make stuff up that defies physics and stupefies Americans about the greatest achievement from America.