Traveling to the Moon

So i'm reading the wikipedia article about the New Horizons mission to Pluto scheduled to arrive in 2015. It mentioned that it only took the craft 9 hours to reach the moon, compared to three days that Apollo 11 took in 1969. So, if we were to send a rocket full of astronauts and equipment to the moon today, would it take only nine hours like the pluto mission craft? Would all that weight slow the escape velocity and make a longer trip? Is modern rocket technology a lot more powerful than it was when we first went to the moon?

what is the game being discussed in this thread, i wish to colonize moons.