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There is no evidence of any claimed technological breakthrough or shortcut to negate WvB's '61 testimony.

Werner von Braun wanted to send a single spacecraft to the Moon, land there, take off again, and return to Earth. That plan suffers from the same problem as "single stage to orbit" (which you should learn about): it means carrying a lot of dead weight. His plan was rejected for that reason.

Orbital launches even today, and the Moon flights in particular, used repeated staging and jettisoning of empty fuel storage, in order to minimize the power needed to "get there".

The solution to von Braun's conundrum wasn't a "technological breakthrough", it was just better planning. A big part of Project Gemini, incidentally, was learning how to dock space in orbit. This would be necessary for the later Moon landings. You would do well to learn about the actual purposes of Project Mercury and Project Gemini.

Oh, and "aulis dot com" carries negative credibility.

Oh, and "aulis dot com" carries negative credibility."

Goll-lly, bub! We should all bow down to that backhanded, broad brush slap of "logic!" /s

We may all be sure the contemporaneous reports of cost overruns and delays for the NOVA booster project were all a ruse to coincidentally scrap the project because WvB and his Peenemünde #2, Kurt Debus, really just weren't bright or clever enough to think of a "single stage to orbit" solution. Please show the contemporaneous (that is, '63-'65) take-down of WvB's way of thinking in favor of placing a redesign-on-the-fly homeless shelter that would go to the moon with mis-measured mating pieces, inch-sized gaps in the outer hull, held together with tape to patch gouges and tears in its various-sized, wrinkled-or-smooth fabric, aluminum and 6mm foil (for shielding, of course--differing by inches with what the Orion project would decades later determine was necessary!). I can easily believe WvB wouldn't have desired he be associated with it, unlike Stanley Kubrick.

Unlike Magnum44's claim, for flights that skirted the upper edges of Low Earth Orbit, astronauts universally reported moderate to several visual effects (from increasing radiation beyond the Van Allen Belts). Such radiation would have been a continuous bombardment, both in the traverse to and on the moon.

Any manned flight to the moon in the rattle traps from Kubrick's sound stage (see pics here) would have died of radiation poisoning. That's why NASA had to claim all record of the Apollo mission technology was destroyed and "had to painfully built it back again" (e.g., in the Orion project).

Only someone in the pay of NASA could dare utter such a lie as the above with a straight face!

You would do well to learn about the actual purposes of Project Mercury and Project Gemini.

...and you would do well to learn what that technical critic and lead astronaut of the Apollo Program, Gus Grissom, and Wernher (note spelling) von Braun internalized as Gus, Ed and Roger learned in the oxygen-fed conflagration that incinerated what would be dubbed Apollo 1.