Consoom "SoUrCe??"
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There's a bit of astrophysicist lore that reads "if you are in orbit, you are halfway to everywhere". It basically means that the majority of energy, fuel, and effort of spaceflight is almost entirely spent on getting through the atmosphere. Once you can do that, everything else is a lot more efficient and safe.
If you believe a man can get to orbit, then getting to the moon genuinely just involves firing a rocket to hurl yourself at it, and waiting until you crash into the surface. It's not all that far, it's a big target, and spaceflight isn't like an old Republic Serial where you fight space monsters and dodge asteroid storms. You just coast until you get there.
The real skill of the moon landing was being able to build machines safe and reliable enough to work flawlessly every step of the way. It's a frictionless vacuum, the spacecraft only needs to hold 1atm of internal pressure (easy) and you put enough snacks in it to keep your occupants alive for a week or two.
Kerbal Space Program is obviously simplified on the engineering but it absolutely makes one realize that spaceflight is just about math and long boring tedium.
At no point did any of the fathers of rocketry and spaceflight - Goddard, Oberth, Von Braun - or even any of the Soviets like Korolev, ever once thought a moon landing was anything but an engineering challenge that they could solve. Von Braun was convinced he could put a man on the moon before the V2 even existed.
The Soviets busted their attempt only because they couldn't resolve the engineering of the N1 rocket in part because of the death of their Von Braun, Korolev, and also in part because they didn't have the expertise of Kurt Debus to design an engine as mighty as the F-1, relying instead on clusters of smaller engines, which enormously increased the likelihood of problems and extended development. They rushed it, and sadly it blew up every time. Five big ass engines, with a tolerance of failure of one, was much more effective than thirty fucking engines that all required engineering to solve issues with fuel feed, vibration, and oscillation, especially since they were trying to rush through *years* of design and testing the Saturn V had received.