“Unlocking the Secrets of the Moon: The Ingenious Strategies That Made NASA’s Historic Landing Possible”
But for the first time in history, a human being had set foot on another world. The historic flight of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a massive eight-year effort to realize President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. But the road from the earth to the moon was far from a smooth one, beset by numerous hurdles and setbacks. For example, the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew in a launch pad fire on January 27, 1967 prompted a complete redesign of the Apollo spacecraft, while ongoing problems with the Saturn V rocket’s massive F-1 rocket engines nearly resulted in the cancellation of the entire Apollo programme. But perhaps the greatest challenge of all was deciding how to land on the moon in the first place. Solving this seemingly trivial question proved far more difficult than expected, requiring years of careful study and the heroic persistence of an obscure but determined engineer. This is the story of how we learned to land on the moon only a little over a half century after humans were still hitching up covered wagons to go places.
By the time President Kennedy announced Project Apollo in May 1961, scientists and engineers at NASA had already been studying methods for manned lunar flight for several years. Initially, the preferred approach was the simplest; known as Direct Ascent, this involved launching one big spacecraft directly to the moon, landing the whole thing on the surface, lifting off again, and returning to earth. This was the approach seen in nearly all science fiction media up to that point, from Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From The Earth to the Moon and its 1902 film adaptation to the 1929 German film Woman in the Moon, the 1950 American film Destination Moon, and the 1954 Tintin comic book Explorers on the Moon. An early concept for Direct Ascent prepared by North American Aviation showed a spacecraft comprising three sections or modules: at the top was the cone-shaped Apollo capsule or Command Module housing the three-man astronaut crew and fitted with a heat shield to allow the spacecraft to reenter the earth’s atmosphere at the end of the mission. Below this was a cylindrical Service Module containing the oxygen tanks, fuel cells, communications gear, and all the other equipment required to keep the crew alive during the mission. And finally at the bottom was a large Descent and Ascent Stage with landing legs and rocket engines to land the whole vehicle on the lunar surface and lift it back off again.
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