Apollo's Unsung Hero

When U.S. astronauts finally reach the surface of the moon, they will land in an ungainly-looking little craft that is officially named the Lunar Module (LM) but is becoming known as "the Spider." Scheduled to be tested in manned flight for the first time next week during the flight of Apollo 9, the Spider is the homely offspring of a concept of Aeronautical Engineer John Houbolt, an unsung hero of the U.S. space program. NASA officials now agree that without Houbolt's lonely campaign early in the 1960s, the U.S. would have been hard pressed to meet John Kennedy's goal of landing men on the moon before 1970.

Even before Kennedy set that goal, NASA scientists, aerospace companies and independent research laboratories were locked in an often bitter debate over the most practical method of making a manned lunar landing. Top NASA officials, most of them trained in airplane development, had generally sided with a direct approach. They wanted a craft that could take off from earth, fly to a lunar landing and return to the earth.

Monster Rocket. Wernher von Braun, director of the NASA facilities at Huntsville, Ala., favored an earth-orbital-rendezvous technique; two or more rockets would be used separately to launch a spacecraft and fuel-carrying stages into earth orbit, where they would be assembled for a flight to the moon. Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is most concerned with unmanned space shots, proposed that extra fuel and supplies be rocketed to the surface of the moon and then be brought together into a supply depot by a remotecontrolled tractor. The astronauts would land near by.

All of the proposals presented nearly insuperable difficulties. For direct ascent from earth to moon, a giant, 12-million-lb.-thrust rocket would be needed--and there were strong doubts that such a monster could be designed, built and tested before the end of the decade. For Von Braun's earth-orbital scheme, a minimum of two expensive Saturn 5 launches would be needed. Both plans called for the expenditure of as much as 100,000 lbs. of fuel merely to settle a spacecraft from 80 ft. to 100 ft. tall gently on the lunar surface. The JPL idea, while permitting the design of a smaller landing craft, would have required several separate launches and had the added risk that astronauts might be stranded on the moon if they landed too far from their previously launched supplies.

While the various factions wrangled, Engineer Houbolt, whose work at NASA's Langley Research Center was not directly connected with space flight, was impressed by still another moon-landing technique: the lunar-orbit rendezvous. Houbolt's plan was to leave the mother craft in orbit around the moon while a light, ferrylike craft descended from it to the lunar surface carrying only one or two of the astronauts. Later, the little craft could blast off, rendezvous and dock with the mother ship, and then be left behind in lunar orbit as the astronauts returned to earth.

Houbolt argued that the concept would save an immense amount of fuel. Because the lunar lander would not need a heavy heat shield for a return through the earth's atmosphere and would not have to carry additional equipment and supplies for the long trip to and from the moon, it could be tens of thousands of pounds lighter than other lunar landing vehicles. The weight reduction would be great enough, he calculated, for the entire mission to be launched by one Saturn 5-type rocket.

Dour Rejection. Sure that he had the answer, Houbolt attended meetings of NASA's moonshot planning group to promote the lunar-orbit-rendezvous (LOR) scheme. His reception was cool. "Your figures lie," shouted one excitable member of the group. "I don't believe a word of it." Wernher von Braun, present at the same meeting, dourly shook his head at Houbolt's proposal and said, "No, that's no good." Recalls Christopher Kraft, director of NASA's manned-flight operations: "When some people first heard of Houbolt's idea, they thought he was nuts."

Convinced that he was right, Houbolt went over the heads of the planning group by writing letters to Robert Seamans, then NASA Associate Administrator (and now Secretary of the Air Force). One of them began: "Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness . . ." It went on to plead, "Give us the go-ahead and we will put men on the moon in very short order." Gradually, as the difficulties with alternate plans became evident, Seamans and others began to realize the virtues of Houbolt's scheme.

Embarrassed Silence. One of the hardest to convince was Wernher von Braun. But when he was finally converted to the lunar-orbit-rendezvous technique, he became a formidable advocate. During a visit to Huntsville, President Kennedy stood in embarrassed silence while Von Braun argued heatedly with Presidential Science Adviser Jerome Wiesner, the last important holdout against LOR. Pressed for a final decision, Kennedy overruled Wiesner in October 1962 and gave NASA permission to proceed with the design and construction of a lunar module.

Last week, as they prepared for the forthcoming Apollo 9 mission, officials in Houston paid tribute to Houbolt, who quit NASA in 1963 and now works for an aeronautical-research firm in Princeton, N.J. "I just thank my lucky stars that guys like Houbolt came along," said Caldwell Johnson, chief of the manned-spacecraft-design office. "I suppose that Columbus had some help too."

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