But wouldn't all that also be true if you did this on a movie studio set?
Earth Rise is the best selling picture of all time. I suspect that pictures of the stars with the Earth floating in them would also have been a big seller. I think it is obvious they were planning on bringing back photos, used excellent equipment and no doubt trained the astronauts. How is it that this did not include a picture of the stars?
Also the pictures we are questioning are not those of the astronauts but of the Earth from the moon.
In taking an image of a subject that is brightly lit, or light itself (such as the moon, the planet and even stars) you must adjust the exposure in cooperation with the "sciences" involved in the properties of film and the camera. The camera is merely a tool to adjust the amount of light that hits the light-sensitive film. Because the subject matter is essentially light itself, it should be self-apparent that we'd need to heavily restrict the amount of light coming from the subject matter... the planet and moon in this case. That would be by using a tight aperture and fast shutter speeds.
Imaging requires a lot of concern with percentage... how much of a percentage the subject matter is occupying in the over-all image.
So, the reason that those settings would exclude the stars is because, though they are bright, light-emitting features, they are relatively small (and insignificant) to the totality of the image. The stars are small in a vast field of blackness... in an image of a stary night, the predominate feature is actually all that blackness... not the light. Therefore, in taking images of the stars, the photographer must place the settings in a way that is, essentially, the exact opposite of an image that has predominate features that are bright/brightly lit.
Hope that helps?