> I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been

> I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been a lot quicker to write, debug and test the complex code required to deliver a man to the moon. This is a poor assumption. It takes a lot more effort to create any moderately-complex modern software system today than it did to create software back then. I'm not saying it wasn't hard to do, and in fact squeezing the most out of the primitive computer systems back then was challenging, and any life-critical system requires extensive planning and testing, but having only 32k to operate in severely limited the complexity of any software. I've worked on modern spacecraft command and control systems, and I've worked with non-flight Fortran code from the Apollo era (ground-based image processing, still in use as recently as 15 years ago, and probably still today). Everything was much simpler back then. Modern software complexity makes everything take more effort, not less. There's a lot more power and a lot more functionality as well, but back in the 60s software was a whole lot simpler. The plethora of tools today exist to abstract away complexity that wasn't even possible then.