Apollo was pretty goofy if you think about -- Yeeting a couple of dudes to the moon in a giant ass rocket so that they can tool around in a little electric-go cart with lawn chair seats and play some golf but it worked.

I think that the Saturn V was a solid platform that was robust enough to do the kinds of things that Von Braun and others had in mind as well as versatile enough to be improved upon.

They would have done it with sufficient budget but the political drive wasn't there. The politicians were more concerned with killing Vietnamese and Cambodians and then selling out American interests to oil companies.