“Unlocking the Secrets of the Moon: The Ingenious Strategies That Made NASA’s Historic Landing Possible”
It is worth noting here that many of the difficulties NASA faced in selecting a lunar landing profile stemmed from a combination of politics and locked-in design decisions. The basic Apollo Spacecraft design had been conceived in 1960 by Maxine Faget, chief designer at NASA’s Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia, as a more sophisticated, general-purpose successor to his primitive Mercury Capsule, which carried the first American astronauts into space. Faget chose a crew size of three so the spacecraft instruments could be continuously monitored in three eight-hour shifts, while the size of the spacecraft and the volume of oxygen, fuel, and other consumables carried aboard it were chosen based on a 14-day mission – the maximum time anticipated for a trip to the moon and back. These design decisions resulted in a spacecraft weighing around 4 metric tons. However, at the time lunar missions were seen as a far-off goal, and little thought was given to how the Apollo spacecraft would actually land on the moon. But after the Soviet Union leapfrogged the United States with a string of spectacular space “firsts” including the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957; and the first manned orbital flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, the U.S. government scrambled to choose a spaceflight goal that would allow them to beat the Soviets. Earth-orbiting space stations and manned lunar flybys were quickly rejected as the Soviets could likely accomplish these feats using existing hardware; the only mission that would require both superpowers to develop new launch vehicles from scratch – giving the US a chance to pull ahead – was a manned lunar landing. Maxine Faget’s Apollo design was thus pressed into service as America’s lunar spacecraft far ahead of schedule.
