John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology) by Logsdon John M

Author:Logsdon, John M. [Logsdon, John M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

The presidential party as President Kennedy toured the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama on September 11, 1962. Identifiable in the image, in addition to President Kennedy are (left to right) center director Wernher von Braun, NASA administrator James Webb, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, presidential science adviser Jerome Wiesner, and director of defense research and engineering Harold Brown. NASA associate administrator Robert Seamans, Jr. is partially visible behind von Braun. Most of those in this photograph participated in a brief but spirited debate about the wisdom of the lunar-orbit rendezvous approach to the lunar landing mission (NASA photograph).

The LOR concept had been brought to Seamans’s attention in an impassioned nine-page November 15, 1961, letter from John Houbolt, an engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, who had bypassed several layers of the NASA chain of command in sending the letter. NASA in late 1961 was focusing on some form of EOR as its preferred approach to the lunar mission, but Houbolt argued that the LOR approach was the better way to getting to the Moon before the end of the decade, was safer and less expensive, and required only one launch.2

After extended analysis of the concept, NASA’s top leaders by early July 1962 had agreed that LOR was indeed the best choice for achieving the lunar mission by the end of the decade and were preparing to announce their decision at a July 11 press conference. In anticipation of the announcement, NASA on July 3 sent a summary of its comparison of the various options to science adviser Wiesner. By the end of the day, Wiesner called Webb “in a highly emotional state” to say that “L.O.R. is the worst mistake in the world.” Webb asked Joseph Shea, the NASA systems engineer who was leading the effort to select the lunar landing approach, to go to the White House immediately; when he met with Wiesner, the science adviser called LOR a “technological travesty.”3

There were several reasons for Wiesner’s reaction.4 One was the intuitive sense that a mission that depended for its success, and for the crew’s survival, on a rendezvous in lunar orbit, 240,000 miles from Earth, would be excessively risky. This was especially the case since there had been no experience with rendezvous, and Project Gemini, the just-initiated effort to gain that experience, was at that time not scheduled to have its first flight until late 1963. (The first flight actually did not come until early 1965.) Given the end of the decade deadline, the choice of mission approach would have to be made before the feasibility of its key element, rendezvous, had been demonstrated. (This of course was also true for Earth orbit rendezvous, but if a problem developed in an Earth-orbiting mission, the astronauts could easily return home.) NASA’s engineering analyses showed that LOR was safer than EOR, but Wiesner and his staff did not trust those analyses. The principal staff person supporting Wiesner on space issues was Nicholas Golovin, who had

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