Those were supported by a 400k people workforce, a basically unlimited budget, and the political and moral support of the most powerful nation on Earth. I'm no

Those were supported by a 400k people workforce, a basically unlimited budget, and the political and moral support of the most powerful nation on Earth. I'm not trying to discount Apollo here, I myself can barely comprehend their achievement at their time. But the magnitude of the effort was much much larger than this one mission. And let's not forget Grissom, White and Chaffee. NASA was _not_ on a successful path pre Apollo 1, as shown by the post-disaster analysis reports. Speculating here, but most likely we would not have gone to the Moon had Apollo 1 not happened. Space is _incredibly_ hard.