Apollo program

• 1. Introduction

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  The Apollo program landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969, and roughly 650 million people worldwide watched it happen on television. That number alone tells you something about the moment. A species that had never left its own planet's orbit suddenly stood on another world. Twelve people would walk on the lunar surface across six landings, the last in December 1972. They brought back rocks older than almost anything on Earth. But the part most people never hear is how close the whole thing came to never happening, and how a single argument among engineers decided the shape of the spacecraft that got there. There is a fire that killed three men strapped into a capsule on the ground. There is an oxygen tank that exploded a quarter of the way to the Moon. There is a president who knew almost nothing about rockets and was put off by the price. How does a goal that sounded impossible in 1961 become a flag standing in lunar dust eight years later? And why, after all of it, did the rockets end up in museums?

• 2. Naming The Chariot

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  NASA manager Abe Silverstein chose the name Apollo at home one evening, early in 1960. He later said, "I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby." The image that decided it was the Greek god Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun, which Silverstein felt fit the grand scale of what NASA was proposing. At that point the program had nothing to do with landing on the Moon. The focus was an advanced crewed spacecraft, the Apollo command and service module, meant to succeed the one-astronaut Mercury capsule. Where Mercury could carry one person on a limited Earth orbit, Apollo would carry three. The early list of possible missions included ferrying crews to a space station and flights that would loop around the Moon without landing. A lunar landing became the program's central purpose only in 1961. Until then, the harder job of testing advanced spaceflight technique fell to a different effort, Project Gemini, which slotted in between Mercury and Apollo.

• 3. A President Persuaded

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  On the 12th of April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space. The shock reinforced an American fear of being left behind. John F. Kennedy, elected the previous November on a campaign promising superiority over the Soviet Union in space and missiles, had so far been cautious. He knew little about the technical side of spaceflight and was put off by the enormous cost of a crewed Moon landing. When NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked for a 30 percent budget increase, Kennedy backed the booster program but deferred the bigger decision. On the 20th of April Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, asking him to assess where America stood and whether it could catch up. Johnson reported back about a week later that the country was "neither making maximum effort nor achieving results necessary" to lead, but judged a crewed Moon landing distant enough that the United States could likely get there first. On the 25th of May 1961, twenty days after the first American crewed flight, Freedom 7, Kennedy stood before Congress and committed the nation to "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the decade was out. The following September, at Rice University in Houston, he sharpened the case: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

• 4. The Argument Over How

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  Tom Dolan at Vought and John Houbolt at Langley Research Center fought for an idea most NASA engineers distrusted. The mission planners had four ways to reach the Moon. Direct Ascent would fly one giant spacecraft straight to the surface, demanding a launcher even bigger than the Saturn V, the Nova-class rocket. Earth Orbit Rendezvous would launch parts separately, up to fifteen times in some plans, and assemble them in orbit. Lunar Surface Rendezvous would send an automated fuel vehicle to the surface first. The fourth, Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, kept a command module in lunar orbit while a small lander carried two astronauts down and back. In early 1961, direct ascent was the favorite. Many engineers feared that rendezvous and docking, never attempted even in Earth orbit, would be nearly impossible around the Moon. Houbolt campaigned through 1960 and 1961, bypassing the NASA hierarchy and writing directly to Associate Administrator Robert Seamans, admitting he spoke "somewhat as a voice in the wilderness." The Marshall Space Flight Center engineers, invested in direct ascent, held out the longest, but Wernher von Braun announced their conversion at a briefing on the 7th of June 1962. Even then it was not settled. Kennedy's science advisor Jerome Wiesner, who opposed human spaceflight, blurted "No, that's no good" in front of the press during a presentation by von Braun at Marshall. Space historian James Hansen concluded that without NASA adopting this "stubbornly held minority opinion in 1962," the country might still have reached the Moon, but almost certainly not by Kennedy's deadline.

• 5. Building The Machines

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  North American Aviation won the contract for the command and service module on the 28th of November 1961, even though its bid was not rated as highly as a rival proposal from the Martin company. Webb, Dryden and Seamans chose it for North American's longer association with NASA. The command module was the cone-shaped crew cabin, 11.42 feet tall and 12.83 feet across, the only major component to survive from the early study designs without big changes. Its exterior carried an ablative heat shield, and parachutes slowed it to an ocean splashdown. Behind it sat the cylindrical service module, holding the main engine, propellants and a fuel cell power system running on liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation built the lunar module, overseen by Thomas J. Kelly. Because it never had to survive Earth's atmosphere, its fuselage was designed with no aerodynamic shaping at all, in extremely lightweight construction. It split into a descent stage and an ascent stage, each with its own engine. Wernher von Braun's team at Marshall developed the launch vehicle, the three-stage Saturn V, which stood 363 feet tall and 33 feet wide with its lunar payload. Its first stage burned a kerosene fuel with liquid oxygen for a rated 7,500,000 pounds of thrust, later upgraded to 7,610,000. The choice of lunar orbit rendezvous on the 11th of June 1962 is what let the Saturn V replace the far larger Nova.

• 6. Fire On The Pad

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  On the morning of the 27th of January 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee climbed into their command module for a "plugs-out" test on Launch Complex 34. The crew had named their flight Apollo 1 as a motivational focus on the first crewed flight. The test was plagued from the start. The crew noticed a strange odor in their spacesuits, which delayed sealing the hatch, and then communications problems forced a hold in the simulated countdown. During that hold an electrical fire began in the cabin and spread fast in the high-pressure, pure oxygen atmosphere. Pressure rose until the cabin's inner wall burst, letting flame erupt onto the pad and frustrating rescue. The astronauts were asphyxiated before the hatch could be opened. An accident review board, watched by both houses of Congress, concluded that "deficiencies existed in command module design, workmanship and quality control." Webb forced North American to remove Harrison Storms as command module program manager and reassigned program office manager Joseph Francis Shea, replacing him with George Low. The fixes reshaped the spacecraft. Engineers switched to a nitrogen and oxygen mixture before and during launch, stripped flammable materials from cabin and suits, and adopted a quick-release, outward-opening hatch. NASA retired the Apollo 1 designation to honor the crew, at their widows' wishes, and renumbered the next flight Apollo 4.

• 7. Earth Orbit To Lunar Surface

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  Apollo 8 was supposed to be a simple Earth-orbiting test, but in the summer of 1968 it became clear the lunar module would not be ready in time. Rather than waste a Saturn V, manager George Low proposed sending the crew to orbit the Moon instead. The Soviet Union had just sent tortoises, mealworms and wine flies around the Moon aboard Zond 5 on the 15th of September 1968, and it was feared cosmonauts might follow. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders made ten lunar orbits in 20 hours, transmitting television pictures of the surface on Christmas Eve. The following March, Apollo 9 demonstrated the lunar module in Earth orbit, with Russell Schweickart testing the full lunar suit and its portable life support system outside the spacecraft. In May 1969, Apollo 10 flew the lunar module to within 50,000 feet of the surface as a dress rehearsal. Then on the 20th of July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed at the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins stayed in lunar orbit. They spent about 21 hours and 36 minutes on the surface, and 2 hours 31 minutes outside walking, photographing, and deploying instruments, broadcasting black-and-white television back to Earth. Armstrong's words have outlasted everything else from that day: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

• 8. The Lifeboat And The End

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  Apollo 13 launched James Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise in April 1970, bound for the Fra Mauro formation, when a liquid oxygen tank exploded two days out. The blast disabled the service module and left the command ship without electrical power. The crew survived by using the lunar module as a "lifeboat," drawing on it for propulsion, power and life support to get home. The advantage had been discussed years earlier. A 1964 study at the Manned Spacecraft Center had actually dropped the lifeboat idea, concluding no single reasonable failure of the command and service module could be identified that would require it. The investigation traced the cause to damage to the tank in the factory and a subcontractor who had not built a component to updated specifications. After the first landings, public and political interest faded, and President Nixon wanted to rein in federal spending. NASA's budget could not sustain missions that cost on average 445 million dollars each while developing the Space Shuttle. Apollo 20 was cancelled so a Saturn V could launch the Skylab laboratory, and missions 18 and 19 were cut by 1971. The whole program cost 25.4 billion dollars and at its peak employed over 400,000 people across some 20,000 firms and universities. Apollo 17, in December 1972, was the only Saturn V night launch and carried NASA's first scientist-astronaut, geologist Harrison Schmitt, who had been lobbied onto the final flight by the lunar geology community. After Apollo, no human would leave low Earth orbit until the Artemis II flyby planned for 2026.