The Apollo programme must be considered one of the defining moments of human evolution & ingenuity. It is an incredible feat of science, mathematics, engineering, invention, technology, manufacturing, assembly, project management, intelligence, team work, finance, political will, human endeavour and resilience . Kennedy gave NASA less than 10 years to deliver something they hadn't even invented and they succeed. They put men on the moon and got them home safely.
To do that created a machine based on cutting edge technology, with 1 million parts that had to work right every time ( all built by the cheapest contractor as the quote goes), with unavoidable multiple single points of failure, with no real idea what would happen, no real procedures for beyond earth orbit, equipment that hadn't been tested in the environment it would face, really narrow technical success criteria, no real idea if the proposed landing site was viable and limited fuel to mess about with, basically no back up or redundancy systems, no guarantee they could reach the moon, land, survive, take off again, meet the mother ship, dock, and come home safely at all and then they asked 3 blokes to be fired into space on top of a rocket of such a size and power that even Wile E. Coyote would think it absurd! The whole thing is bonkers.
It is even more incredible when you consider this was 1969, computers were the size of a house, complex mathematical & guidance computations of a life and death nature were done via slide rules, pencil and paper ( and enough Russian probes missed the moon to make this no easy activity), you couldn't get live TV from the other side of the world, most people didn't own a phone and steam trains had only just been withdrawn from British Railways.
I have long been fascinated by space exploration ( even if the science is beyond me being literally rocket science!) and think it is shaming that we in the west have seemingly given up and handed the baton for the exploration of space to the Chinese and Indians. The success of the Apollo programme and the feelings it produced should be compared with our current times which feels so small, petty and insular. Can you imagine Trump giving the speech Kennedy gave? Even Nikon sounded appropriately presidential!
The moon landings may not have happened at all if it were not for this guy's contribution.
More accurately: American moon landings may never have happened. The Russians were also trying to get there and may well have succeeded, eventually. Worth noting they sent a probe, Luna 15, ahead of Apollo 11 in the hope they could return samples to earth first. It crashed into the moon. It was tracked by Jodrel Bank and there was a genuine fear it might be a manned mission.