The people that "died" were on the Apollo missions that didn't head towards the moon. Maybe the rockets were perfected, but some evil people just decided to blow them up, since they had no use? A few astronauts would be a low price to pay to have everyone beleive them, and America's honor is worth a few lives as well.
Anything to keep the Russians from actually getting up there first.

And for the recordings, especially the N. Armstrong clip, my guess would be that they launched an empty rocket and started playing a film they recorded several months earlier. When they returned to earth, they were just put in a drop pod on earth and then taken to the skies with a plane that dropped them off.

"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram