John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon by John M. Logsdon

Author:John M. Logsdon [Logsdon, John M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science, History, Non-Fiction, Politics
ISBN: 9780230110106
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

“ I A M N O T T H AT I N T E R E S T E D I N S PA C E”

145

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 administra-

tor 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).

heavy fuel and even heavier heat shield required for the return to Earth, it

could be much lighter than a spacecraft that would both land on the Moon

and also have to carry the crew back to Earth. This weight reduction result-

ing from this separation of functions made it possible to launch the whole

lunar landing mission with one Saturn V booster, rather than the two that

would be required by the Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) approach.

The LOR concept had been brought to Seamans’s attention in an impas-

sioned nine-page November 15, 1961, letter from John Houbolt, an engi-

neer 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 mis-

sion, but Houbolt argued that the LOR approach was the better way to get-

ting 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

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J O H N F. K E N N E D Y A N D T H E R A C E T O T H E M O O N

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 lead-

ing 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 exces-

sively risky. This was especially the case since there had been no experience

with rendezvous,

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