the entire 60-foot, four-ton aluminum shell was in orbit. The Defense Department proudly announced the success of Project SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment). A tiny transmitter inside the empty Atlas shell broadcast tape-recorded Christmas greetings from President Eisenhower to the world below. It was international showmanship worthy of Nikita Khrushchev.
The Space Task Group’s first priority was to design an orbital vehicle that would protect a human passenger through all phases of a spaceflight “envelope”: launch acceleration, weightlessness above the atmosphere, reentry deceleration with its furnacelike heat, and descent to parachute deployment at about 10,000 feet. NASA designers had two basic choices: the first was a winged spaceplane like the rocket-powered X-15 and the futuristic Dyna-Soar space glider the Air Force wanted; the second was a wingless high-drag, blunt-body capsule. A capsule was the only design that met the weight limits imposed by the Atlas missile (the sole American booster capable of orbiting a manned spacecraft): approximately 3,000 pounds.
Max Faget, Langley’s ablest designer, and his team proposed a variation of the existing conical missile warhead that looked like an upside-down badminton shuttlecock. The blunt bottom was a convex fiberglass heat shield that would point forward and disperse the reentry deceleration heat through a fiery meteor trail – a process known as “ablation.” A cluster of small solid retrorockets in the center of the heat shield would brake the capsule from its orbital speed and return it to Earth. The tiny cabin was a lopped-off cone topped by a squat cylinder that held radio antennas and the parachutes. On top of this cylinder was a girdered escape tower powered by solid rockets that would pull the capsule away from a stricken booster (no one really trusted the Atlas), lifting it to a safe altitude for parachute deployment. The whole thing was a far cry from the sleek, winged spacecraft that many popular scientific magazines had imagined.
I remember the guys in my squadron in Germany commenting that the Mercury capsule looked more like a diving bell than an aircraft. The pilot would lie flat on his back on a form-fitting couch. But even if the Mercury spacecraft wasn’t as fiercely beautiful as the supersonic fighters we flew, it was designed to “fly” higher and faster than any jet plane, in an entirely new environment, space. There was no need for swept wings to provide lift, or a raked tail for control. The velocity imparted by the booster would lift the Mercury spacecraft far above the atmosphere.
Which way to the moon?
It was only 18 days after Gagarin became the first human in orbit that President Kennedy announced, in May 1961, that the United States proposed to land a man on the Moon and bring him safely home before the end of that decade. He said that they would do it, not because it was easy, but because it was “hard”!
Too right, thought NASA’s top managers! At that time the youthful National Aeronautics and Space Administration had only vague theories as to how such a landing could be accomplished. Despite the confident 10- year programme which had so impressed me and many others, their scientists and technicians had actually achieved only one 15-minute manned space log; and while Project Apollo had been announced 10 months earlier, its stated aim was merely to fly men around the Moon – “a circumlunar mission” – without landing.
The President’s “deadline” led to some rather desperate planning. Sending men to the Moon was relatively easy; the difficult part was bringing them back again. Two Lockheed engineers proposed that an astronaut should be sent on a one-way trip and left there, with food, oxygen and other supplies being rocketed to him for several years while methods and equipment were devised for bringing him back. This solution was still being advocated in June 1962 by Bell Aerospace engineers, who pointed out that while he was waiting the astronaut could perform valuable scientific work. It would be a hazardous mission, they conceded, but “it would be cheaper, faster, and perhaps the only way to beat Russia.” NASA’s historians say there is no evidence that their administrators ever took such a plan seriously; but they did listen to it, and it is recorded.
NASA had inherited from the US Air Force a general assumption that “direct ascent” was the way to get to the Moon. As explained earlier, the USAF had decided some years before that a manned base on the Moon was desirable for defence reasons, and had been working on a plan for a lunar expedition called Lunex since 1958. They thought they could send three men there and back in a huge three-stage rocket called Nova, providing an initial thrust of 12 million lb – almost twice as big as the projected Saturn 5.
Nova was the largest of a series of rocket designs proposed by Dr Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket engineers. Von Braun had always supported direct approach as the best way to get men to the Moon. Although rendezvous and docking techniques in Earth or lunar orbit were much discussed, practical tests were a long way off, so no one was sure that they would work. The weakness of direct approach, on the other hand, was that a huge weight – the whole third stage of the rocket – had to be slowed down for the lunar landing, still carrying enough propellant to re-launch part of itself and its crew on the return journey to the Earth.
To lessen the landing weight, a lunar surface rendezvous had been proposed. For that an unmanned tanker vehicle would be sent first – but then the problem was that the manned lander must touch down near enough for the astronauts to transfer the tanker’s fuel. That in turn required that the final landing would have to be controlled by the onboard astronauts. But how would they be able to see the surface from the pointed top of the rocket, with their sloping windows looking skywards? Mirrors, periscopes, TV and even hanging porches were proposed, and a lot of time was wasted on this concept until it was finally agreed that it would not work. It was also felt that developing a rocket as large as Nova would take far too much time.
Assembling rockets and spacecraft in either Earth orbit or lunar orbit were repeatedly proposed as solutions, because this could be done by multiple launches of one or more of seven alternative variations of von Braun’s proposed Saturns. But von Braun himself was still describing any rendezvous proposals as “premature” at meetings in February 1962.
John Houbolt, assistant chief of the Dynamics Load Division at the Langley Research Center, had been arguing the case for LOR, as lunar orbit rendezvous soon became known, quite passionately since 1960. He maintained that if a simple spacecraft could be dropped off to land two astronauts on the Moon and then bring them back to the parent craft waiting in lunar orbit, enormous weight savings would be achieved. It would no longer be necessary to take the heavy Apollo craft, with its heatshield and fuel for the return flight to Earth, down to the lunar surface. Lowering all that weight and lifting it off again consumed many tons of propellant which could all be saved.
But the disadvantages – that such a lightweight ferry could place only a small payload on the Moon, and,
