[gngeal]

Decades of research in numerous fields were required before the Apollo missions could happen.

Actually, it was less than one decade of research post-Kennedy's-announcement, and a lot of groundwork had already been laid by then. The whole thing was standing on the shoulders of giants from day one. It's really difficult to pick any single ground-breaking development in the Apollo project; it was more like a lot of R&D trickle in disparate areas converging on a solution for a single goal, all of which was being built on a solid foundation we had already had by that time.

For example, the Apollo Guidance Computer was, AFAIK, the first serially produced digital computer made of integrated circuits, and I believe that for quite some time, the manufacturers of ACGs in the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (an offshoot of MIT) were the single largest purchaser of ICs on this planet. The consequence was that the use of ICs in complex computers had been validated, Fairchild Semiconductor (who provided the NOR gates used in the computer) amortized their investments and went on churning them out in ever increasing numbers. You know what followed. But this was more about speeding up the adoption rather then stimulating the development of something completely new.

Experts in numerous fields had to collaborate on the mission.

Since it's a software project, you could also argue that you need experts in various fields of programming. The guy who writes a driver for a new device manufactured by his employer to be included in the mainline kernel probably isn't somenone who you're going to trust with redesigning the kernel memory allocator.