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The belts trap highly charged particles and spending lots of time in them can cause radiation effects, but passing through them to get to the moon or mars or anywhere else is not fatal, and can be mitigated by shielding.

We did not have the shielding technology needed to pass safely through the Van Allen Belts in 1969. Heck, we didn’t even know the extent of the belts. Later probes even found additional belts! NASA said our pilots navigated using stars.?.? Well, they would have had to since navigation computers were not powerful enough. Do you believe they navigated 238,000 miles using the stars they said they couldn’t see? Additionally Solar irradiance outside the belts is deadly. What protected our young men from this?

There are so many ignorant statements in your post its hard to know where to start. 1) The radiation belts dont subject you to lethal dosage instantly. It takes days of exposure. The flights to the moon transit in a few hours. 2) Anything between you and the radiation source is a shield as it absorbs the charged particles first. The space ship was a shield. 3) Solar irradiance outside the belts lethal? Only if there is a storm, which the space weather experts watch out for, and can provide warning to have astronauts move to shielded areas or orient the ship for best shielding. 4) Optical nav is as old as the kings navy, and yes the astronauts used sextants as part of the nav solutions going and coming from the moon. We use the same principles today to fly missions to the other planets. The only difference is there are cameras that we can measure angles from planetary limb and stars with instead of people and sextants.