Originally Posted by tore

I guess one question one could also ask is why should it be so hard? Expensive, yes - obviously, but is really sending people to the moon the kind of sci-fi feat people take for granted that it is? You need a rocket to get everything up there, once in orbit, you need to point the "ship" in the right direction and have some kind of propulsion, you need to contain pressure in the ship and a landing module and so on. Taking off from the moon and coming back should be easier than escaping the earth's gravity. Then you need some kind of heat shield when you reenter atmosphere. Parachutes will allow for safe landing .. On top of all this, you need communications with earth.

The solutions to this put together is impressive, but when you dissect it, it doesn't seem so unbelievable that someone could do this by the end of the 60s. Rocket technology from WW2 was available for example. So was radio and they could "easily" calculate trajectories and so on.