The Hidden Challenges NASA Overcame to Achieve the Impossible Moon Landing
The NASA administration soon split into two camps, each vehemently defending its favoured approach. In many cases preferences were driven by more than simply numbers; for example, Earth Orbit Rendezvous would require the construction of a space station, a lifelong dream of Wernher von Braun’s which would have many scientific applications beyond the moon landing. It would also require the construction of significantly more launch hardware – an attractive proposition for contractors seeking lucrative government contracts.
But as the debate raged on over the merits of Direct Ascent vs. Earth Orbit Rendezvous, a third possibility began quietly circulating among NASA engineers – an approach known as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR. First proposed by the Chance Vought Company in 1960, LOR challenged the primary assumption at the heart of the other proposed mission profiles: that the entire spacecraft had to land on and take off from the lunar surface. Instead, the Chance-Vought engineers proposed constructing a lightweight landing vehicle which the astronauts would use to descend to the lunar surface, leaving the rest of the spacecraft in lunar orbit. Once the astronauts had completed their mission, they would lift off from the lunar surface in the lander, rendezvous and dock with the orbiting spacecraft, and discard the now-redundant lander before returning home. As the lander didn’t need to withstand the stresses of launch and reentry like the main crew capsule, it could be made extremely lightweight, greatly reducing the size and weight of the rocket needed to launch the entire combination to the moon. In July 1961, NASA Langley engineer James Chamberlin – a Canadian who had previously worked on the ill-fated Avro CF-105 Arrow interceptor project – fleshed out this concept in a proposal based on the 2-man Gemini capsule. Along with the capsule itself, his proposed mission would carry one or two simple, open-cockpit lunar landers or “bugs”. On reaching lunar orbit, one of the astronauts would leave the capsule, spacewalk over to the “bug”, and fly it down to the lunar surface. Once his mission was complete, he would lift off, rendezvous with the Gemini, and spacewalk back to the capsule before returning home. Chamberlin calculated that the Gemini-based mission could be accomplished using a single Saturn C-3 – a one million kilogram or 2.2 million pound launch vehicle originally designed for the Earth Orbit Rendezvous approach – and the 2-man Apollo-based mission using the slightly larger C-5. Yet despite its many advantages, Chamberlin’s LOR concept was immediately rejected by NASA as too risky, too limited, and – for the reasons previously mentioned – politically threatening to North American Aviation’s Apollo spacecraft design.
Yet Langley continued to explore the LOR concept, modifying it to use an enclosed and pressurized Lunar Excursion Module or LEM which could dock with the 3-man Apollo spacecraft, allowing two astronauts to transfer between the two vehicles without having to perform a spacewalk. But once again NASA rejected the proposal as it involved performing a rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit – considered at the time to be far too risky. If the two astronauts aboard the LEM were unable to dock with the main spacecraft, they would be left stranded 384,400 kilometres from home – far away from any possible rescue. For this reason, NASA continued to focus on approaches which kept the entire spacecraft together throughout the entire mission.
Now enter the hero of our story, a NASA Langley engineer named John C. Houbolt. Born in Altoona, Iowa but raised in Joliet, Illinois, he obtained a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois in 1942. That same year, he joined the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory – then operated by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics or NACA – as an assistant civil engineer in the Structures Research Division. However, he soon transitioned into aerodynamics, obtaining a doctorate in aerothermodynamics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich in 1957 before returning to Langley, becoming Associate Chief of the Dynamic Loads Division in 1960 and Chief of the Theoretical Mechanics Division in 1962 – after NACA had become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA. Prior to his involvement in the Space Program, Houbolt’s main claim to fame were his investigations into the phenomenon of propeller whirl mode flutter, which was involved in the crashes of two Lockheed L-188 Electra airliners in 1959 and 1960.
As the debate over lunar landing profiles began to heat up, Houbolt and his small research group in the Theoretical Mechanics Division, including engineers Clinton E. Brown and William H. Michael Junior, quickly latched onto the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous concept, which they calculated would be the most fuel and hardware-efficient approach and the only one capable of placing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. There is some debate as to who actually originated the concept; as previously mentioned a version of LOR was submitted by James Chamberlin in July 1961, while Clinton Brown conducted various studies on lunar parking orbits. Houbolt, however, later claimed to have independently come up with the same idea.
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