“Unlocking the Secrets of the Moon: The Ingenious Strategies That Made NASA’s Historic Landing Possible”
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.
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