After WW2, where did the idea of going to the moon came from?
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The idea existed even before WW2. During the interwar period scientists from Great Britain and Germany were kind of involved in their own little space race, although severely lacking in technology and funds. But you do see this in both plans from this period as well as the science fiction in both movies and cartoons.
They did not manage to get to the moon in the interwar period but the technology progressed far enough that during WW2 the same scientists would develop various weapons, including anti-tank rockets, cruise missiles, short range ballistic missiles and even rocket ships.
After the war the scientists and technology were captured by the US and USSR. The main mission was still to develop weapons to be used if the cold war became hot. So they continued developing larger missiles to carry warheads further. When you get to intercontinental ballistic missiles the difference between hitting a target half way around the globe and missing the target and end up in orbit is more of a rounding error then a significant improvement to the rocket. So the way you would demonstrate to the other side that you had a working intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world would be to launch a satellite. And the way you would demonstrate that you actually had capsules which could ensure the nuclear warhead could survive reentry was to replace the warhead with an astronaut and show they would survive.
This was actually how the first people got into space. Civilian rockets were almost identical to the military ones except for some life support systems and such. The two sides would use civilian space missions to demonstrate their military capabilities and their ingenuity and technological advancements. If civilian scientists could send live pictures from orbit imagine what the military scientists could do. Of course there were military orbital missions such as spy cameras, communications satellites and even proposed weapons staged in orbit that could be launched at any time.
The moon mission concept was reintroduced by Kennedy. At the time the US was quite a bit behind the Soviets in space technology so to promote this technology within the US and to disguise the future failures a bit he set a goal that was so far out that they would be able to catch up. To put this into perspective a lot of the Apollo scientists were not even High School graduates when he made this speech. Buzz Aldrin was still in collage working on his masters while Neil Armstrong was working as a test pilot for the X-15 program. So the Moon was still a far away target that would require a new generation of scientists but was considered just possible, and it turned out that it was just possible within the timeframe.
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