NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER 1917-2017
PIONEERING SPACE Langley’s Role in Crewed Spaceflight By Craig Collins
When President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to send human beings to the Moon on May 25, 1961, he delivered one of the most consequential speeches in U.S. history – and one of the many consequences was the expansion of expertise and capabilities within the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Space Task Group that had been established at Langley to lead the Mercury program would move to a larger facility, the Manned Spacecraft Center, in Houston, and other specialists would work on the Moon landing from NASA facilities including the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Marshall Space Flight Center, and the three Research Centers: Langley, Ames, and Lewis (now Glenn). The lunar exploration program was a whole-of-NASA movement, involving hundreds of thousands of people and more than 20,000 university and private-sector partners – and the researchers at Langley, where the U.S. space program was born, would play key roles throughout. What many historians consider NASA Langley’s most important contribution to the Apollo mission happened before the program had fully launched. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon “before the decade is out” meant the problems of crewed lunar exploration had to be solved quickly – and the sequence involved in a Moon landing was far more complicated than a Mercury capsule orbit of the Earth: The Apollo spacecraft would launch from Earth, travel 250,000 miles to the Moon, land, take off from
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the lunar surface, and travel another 250,000 miles home. NASA considered three options for achieving these steps. The first studied was direct ascent, the method popularized in science fiction novels and movies: A massive rocket that would boost a spaceship large enough to reach the Moon, land, and launch itself from the lunar surface intact. The rocket capable of lifting such a spacecraft would have to be the size of a battleship, however, and a huge amount of
