> Apollo was certainly a monumental engineering achievement, but did it require that we 100X the state of the art efficiency of some critical tech?
One order of magnitude in propulsion.
When Kennedy made his “We choose to go to the Moon” speech [1], our most powerful rocket was the Saturn I. Its H-1 engines thrusted at 200k lbf [2]. The Saturn V’s F-1s did 1.5mm lbf [3]. (The Saturn V, similarly, could lift an order of magnitude more mass to LEO than the Saturn I.)
It wouldn’t surprise me to find 100x increases in some material’s performance, et cetera.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon