To flat Earth advocates, the conspiracy has to exist. If the conspiracy doesnu2019t exist, then we canu2019t live on a flat Earth for many reasons, starting with pictures of the Earth taken from high enough to show the whole thing (not LEO like ISS, that can only see about 3% of the surface of the Earth at any one time). So thatu2019s all the benefit the conspiracy needs from their point of view. If the conspiracy doesnu2019t exist, then theyu2019re wrong. So what the advocate has to gain by the conspiracy existing is far more important to the advocate than what the government would have to gain by the conspiracy existing.As to what they think the conspiracy gains by existing, it breaks down to two things. First, NASAu2019s budget. Yeah, that thing thatu2019s a third the size of just the increase in the Defense budget in 2023. I mean, really, whatever conspiracists decided that going to all the effort of faking everything NASA has ever done all for what little expense they can hide in NASAu2019s budget is on the order of the bank robber that wrote his note on the back of one of his own deposit slips. You could get a much bigger slice of the pie just by overcharging the military for something than you could with NASAu2019s budget after you cover the expenses of faking all the stuff they do. And thatu2019s before you budget in the protective forces necessary to u201ckeep people away from a 99,601 mile long ice wall surrounding the world.u201dThe second item is that NASA gets to lead people away from God. I donu2019t even know where to begin, other than to say that televangelists probably drive more people away from God than NASA does. This is usually the biblical literalists that have interpreted the bible as to meaning that the Earth is flat and stationary. Never mind the fact that if it were flat, proving it to be so would be easy and cause a backlash against NASA and anyone that supported the spherical Earth conspiracy, so not a smart play if you wanted to draw people away from God.