“We were all a bunch of dummies and believed it.” Please visit the Columbia Space Center in Downey, CA, for a few hours or read Gray’s Angle of Attack and learn about the thirty companies and four hundred thousand skilled employees in every state who successfully built six Mercury flights, twelve Gemini flights and seventeen Apollo flights.
The skilled employees all built components.
They have no clue how they were actually used.
They believed what they were told—just like everybody else did back then when we were naive.