APOLLO’S AMAZING SPACECRAFT The Apollo program’s rockets and spacecraft have earned a lasting place in human history. BY CRAIG COVAULT Photos courtesy of NASA
WELL BEFORE PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY CALLED FOR A MANNED LUNAR LANDING, KEY APOLLO HARDWARE ELEMENTS, ESPECIALLY THE ENGINES FOR THE SATURN V MOON ROCKET, HAD ALREADY BEEN PUT IN DEVELOPMENT BY THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION. This work was fueled by the leadership of German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. Concepts for the Apollo command and lunar modules were also being laid out at companies like Grumman and North American Aviation years before the Kennedy speech. These largely unheralded conceptual efforts were closeted in many companies that would later bid on the nearly $25 billion of Apollo contracts during the 1960s. Von Braun’s heavy rocket design work during the Eisenhower administration was centered at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. By 1959, it was shifted to NASA and renamed the Marshall Space Flight Center, with von Braun as director. But it was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, not NASA, that funded initial Saturn rocket work pioneered there. These efforts laid the technological foundation for the first machines that would carry humans from Earth to another body in space. “We go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” said Kennedy in his May 1961 speech at Rice University in Houston. But perhaps not as hard as he wanted the Soviet Union to believe. According to space historian Asif A. Siddiqi, the Soviets did not engage in a Moon race with the United States until two years after the Kennedy speech. They did not believe that Kennedy was serious – or if he was, that the United States could do it given the slow pace of the U.S. program up until that time. Soviet rocket pioneer Sergei Korolev had started to develop the massive N-1 rocket, equal to a Saturn V, but he envisioned it as a manned Mars vehicle that would possibly do only circumlunar missions that would not even land on the Moon. The Soviet government did not change N-1 plans to put the USSR into a race to land on the Moon until 1964. All four unmanned flight tests of the N-1 between 1969-1972 failed, indicating the Soviets never really had a chance to win the Moon race. Kennedy was not acting out of hubris, but rather homework when he made his challenge. He knew that key hardware elements, like
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the 1.5-million-pound-thrust F-1 engine – a power plant that could propel the United States to the Moon – was, by 1960, already being built and tested. NASA had been formed in 1958 as a civilian agency, and needed a mission to go somewhere using something larger than converted ballistic missiles. The early development of the F-1 engine, powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, was seen as one of the steps necessary to get ready for whatever was to come in the civilian space program. The Moon was high on the list, but so also was a large Earthorbiting space station. To carry three men to the Moon and back, the United States would need to develop a launcher that could place about 260,000 pounds in Earth orbit. This would be an assemblage of propellant and hardware for a 500,000-mile, seven-day round trip with as many as three days on the lunar surface. A decision on how to fly a mission to the Moon would be critical to how the Apollo spacecraft, the machines of Apollo, would be built. NASA had to choose among: • Direct ascent. In this concept, pictured in many science fiction depictions, the vehicle would launch directly to the Moon. It would not stop in Earth or lunar orbit to reconfigure what had been launched from Earth. It would take off and fly to the surface of the Moon and back as mostly a single entity. • Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR). An Apollo mission using this concept would require two launches: the first to Earth orbit carrying a lunar module for the Moon and propellant for the round trip, and a second launch to fly up the crew that would then climb into the large vehicle that would fire off to the Moon. Von Braun favored this concept because it would also involve a small space station as a refueling point and docking location for both rockets. But EOR was too complex to succeed by 1969. • Lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR). In this mode, all of the elements would be launched at once, but be
