lunar-orbit rendezvous Concepts

Apollo

by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox · 1 Jan 1989 · 619pp · 197,256 words

.A.,” pronounced “en ay see ay.” They never say “nacka.” But (don’t ask why) they pronounce NASA “nasa.” The same inexplicable distinction applies to lunar-orbit rendezvous, L.O.R. (always “el oh ar,” never “lore”) and the descent propulsion system, DPS (always “dips,” never “dee pee ess”). Confronted with this arbitrary

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at the same time, so they no longer needed the third man to keep watch—but they did need him now to carry out the lunar-orbit rendezvous. An even better example of Johnson’s principle is the way that Apollo came to have those gracefully rounded corners. “You’ll talk to some

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the competition. By the middle of 1959, they were already concentrating on how to get to the moon. [* Historians have found earlier references to the lunar-orbit rendezvous concept. Yuri Konratyuk, a Russian rocket theoretician, had written a paper suggesting an analogous scheme back in 1916, and H. E. Ross, a British scientist

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idea in the 1950s do not seem to have been aware of this work. Dolan’s team gets credit for being the first to propose lunar-orbit rendezvous after a lunar landing became a live technological possibility.] The chief barrier to getting to the moon and back again was the energy budget. Putting

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a Parking Orbit for Lunar Soft Landing Mission,” which Langley circulated in May 1960. At about this time, another name for the technique began appearing—lunar-orbit rendezvous, or L.O.R. But at that time only a handful of people in NASA were thinking seriously about a lunar landing anyway, and no

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by use of a second spacecraft. For Houbolt, what happened next was like a conversion experience. “Almost spontaneously,” he wrote later, “it became clear that lunar-orbit rendezvous offered a chain-reaction simplification on all back effects: development, testing, manufacturing, erection, countdown, flight operations, etc. All would be simplified. The thought struck my

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day wore on, it became increasingly apparent to Shea that their message, still tentative, was that, actually, they had been doing some more thinking about lunar-orbit rendezvous and, as a matter of fact, they were beginning to think it was a good idea. 1 In later years, Gilruth minimized Houbolt’s role

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, you know. . . . Actually, we at the Space Task Group had not decided on any mode to go, and I was very much interested in the lunar-orbit rendezvous, and we were the guys that really sold it. It wasn’t Houbolt’s letter to Seamans.” This attitude mystified and hurt Houbolt. “I talked

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more questions, it begins to make more sense.” As the weeks passed, he and Houbolt chatted from time to time. Maynard began to realize that lunar-orbit rendezvous was not so much harder than some of the things he was already considering. He had lately been playing with the idea of leaving the

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Faget shortly after the Kennedy speech. Gilruth had discovered that Faget had told people at headquarters that the Space Task Group wasn’t interested in lunar-orbit rendezvous, and he was uncharacteristically abrupt: It wasn’t Faget’s prerogative to tell them that, Gilruth recalled telling the designer—and besides, they ought to

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be looking hard at L.O.R. themselves. Later, Gilruth would say that it wasn’t until he became convinced that lunar-orbit rendezvous would work that he truly began to believe that they could get to the moon by the end of the decade. Al Kehlet and Chuck

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Mathews began some new in-house analyses for the Space Task Group on the lunar-orbit rendezvous option and convinced themselves that there was a lot to it. As Faget watched Caldwell and Owen struggling with ways to make one spacecraft do

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appreciate the merits of having a second, specialized spacecraft to make the landing. He still thought that Houbolt’s figures on weights were wrong, but lunar-orbit rendezvous was turning out to be the more elegant engineering solution. If Faget was opinionated and stubborn, he was also irresistibly attracted to elegant solutions. Faget

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the apostle of direct ascent, the man who had so grievously insulted Houbolt, began to come around to the conclusion that, in his own words, “lunar-orbit rendezvous really looked like the thing to do.” Houbolt could never get over Max’s gall—not only did he become an advocate, but a few

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years later at cocktail parties, Faget would come up to him and say, “Oh, anyone who thinks about it for five minutes can see that lunar-orbit rendezvous is the way to go.” 2 These conflicting views about the mode were still being untangled when Caldwell Johnson drove out to Langley on Tuesday

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with Houston, they seemed equally stubborn on the issue of how NASA should proceed with Apollo. By this time, M.S.C. was openly behind lunar-orbit rendezvous while Marshall remained attached to earth-orbit rendezvous. After his visits Shea reported to Holmes: “Most of the M.S.C people seem enthusiastic about

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it came down to this: If NASA went via earth-orbit rendezvous, they would need two launches of the Saturn V. If they went via lunar-orbit rendezvous, they could do it in one. By this time, Shea was also pushing the centers to come to grips with the mode issue through a

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. Frick announced that the next time they would do it right—with “a bit of showmanship,” too. They would try to convince von Braun that lunar-orbit rendezvous was less costly than E.O.R. and better from an operational standpoint, which, they planned to emphasize, was something they did have a lot

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argument is over and no one knows how to say the obvious. To him, the meeting had made it clear that “we had to go lunar-orbit rendezvous; it just wasn’t gonna work any other way, no matter what the politics were.” But no one knew how to say it, how to

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corporate interest in earth-orbit rendezvous. If earth-orbit rendezvous were chosen, presumably North American would build the expanded spacecraft. If, on the other hand, lunar-orbit rendezvous was chosen, there was a good chance that a separate contract for the lunar lander would be written and that some company other than North

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to wonder whether it made sense to keep on fighting it. Abruptly, he spoke into the silence: “I’ve heard all these good things about lunar-orbit rendezvous,” he said. “I’d like to hear what sonofabitch thinks it isn’t the right thing to do.” There was another long pause. Owen Maynard

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. Caldwell Johnson remembered just the long pause, and then Paup wrapping it up with, “I guess that’s the way we’re going to go, lunar-orbit rendezvous.” To Johnson, everybody seemed happy and relieved that it was over with. The Houston people were a little optimistic in their reading, for Wernher von

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that day represented many of the facts von Braun had been waiting for, however, and he meditated on them. He himself dated his commitment to lunar-orbit rendezvous from a trip to Houston a few weeks later when his Marshall team presented its most recent thinking on earth-orbit rendezvous. “I think that

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secret. A month later, in a long afternoon’s meeting with Joe Shea, von Braun gave no hint that he had decided in favor of lunar-orbit rendezvous. Like Gilruth, von Braun would always deny that he had changed his mind about anything. “I wasn’t committed to earth-orbit rendezvous very strongly

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Shea’s surprise and to the apparent stupefaction of most of the men from Marshall, that while all of the leading mode alternatives were feasible, lunar-orbit rendezvous “offers the highest confidence factor of successful accomplishment within this decade.” Engineering elegance had won out: “A drastic separation of these two functions [lunar landing

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been watching from the sidelines, and were perplexed and disturbed by NASA’s decision. PSAC’s reaction was the one that everyone initially had toward lunar-orbit rendezvous: It must be more complicated and more dangerous than earth-orbit rendezvous. Wiesner assigned one of his own people to conduct a study of the

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.” Shea walked the few blocks to the Executive Office Building and found Wiesner in his office with Golovin. As Shea recalled it, Wiesner was furious. Lunar-orbit rendezvous was a “technological travesty.” Even NASA’s own analyses showed that it was. “Look at that,” he said to Shea, pointing to a page in

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the modes. Many factors made up the muddle—Golovin’s history at NASA, Shea’s cocky confidence in his own numbers, Wiesner’s conviction that lunar-orbit rendezvous was intrinsically more dangerous no matter what the numbers said. But the core of the controversy continued to be the disagreement on how to estimate

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of the ground testing? Because of PSAC’s objections to L.O.R., NASA hedged at the press conference on July 11. The choice of lunar-orbit rendezvous was tentative, Webb said. More studies would be conducted. Throughout the summer and into the fall, PSAC mounted a persistent campaign to have the decision

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how. Chapter 10. “It aged me, I’m sure” On June 28, 1962, the same day Jim Webb learned that the centers had agreed on lunar-orbit rendezvous, NASA’s first F-1 engine destroyed itself on a test stand at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The F-1 engine was the

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in two launches. Five F-l’s, producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust, could permit a lunar landing in a single launch by using lunar-orbit rendezvous. The question in the spring of 1961 was whether the F-l was in fact feasible—not even the Russians with their large boosters had

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to go to the moon L.O.R. in November ’62. And there was still no design for a command and service module compatible with lunar-orbit rendezvous. No design. I found it hard to understand.” And so Shea began to see first-hand what came to be the closest thing to an

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back down on the pad, and no one had figured out how to do that. But there was a strange and probably crazy idea called lunar-orbit rendezvous, promulgated relentlessly by this man, John Houbolt. (NASA) The consequence of Houbolt’s crazy idea was this unearthly machine, the Lunar Module. This one is

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: Letter from John Houbolt to Robert Seamans, 15 November 1961, provided courtesy of John Houbolt. The earliest thinking about lunar-orbit rendezvous: John M. Logsdon, “Selecting the Way to the Moon: The Choice of the Lunar Orbital Rendezvous Mode,” Aerospace Historian (June 1971), pp. 63–70. For estimates of weight savings using L.O.R.: Brooks

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Lunar Module, pronounced “lem.” LM Lunar Module, also pronounced “lem.” LMP Lunar Module Pilot, pronounced “limp.” L.O.I. Lunar-Orbit Insertion. L.O.R. Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous. LOX Liquid Oxygen, pronounced “lox.” M.A.-l Mercury-Atlas 1, the first flight of a Mercury capsule on an Atlas. MER Mission Evaluation room

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight

by David A. Mindell · 3 Apr 2008 · 377pp · 21,687 words

Procuring and Screening of Integrated Circuits.’’ Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, 1965. Hansen, James R. Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous Concept. Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1995. Hansen, James R. Engineer in Charge: A History of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, 1917–1958. NASA History Series. Washington

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11

by James Donovan · 12 Mar 2019

NASA ever actually considered this suggestion. But there was another option. John Houbolt wasn’t the first one to come up with the idea of lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR). A self-educated Russian mechanic named Yuri Kondratyuk had suggested it in 1917 and so had an Englishman, Harry E. Ross, in 1948. Houbolt

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included three hundred potential Apollo contractors and several Space Task Group members, Houbolt tried again. Faget and several others told him to forget LOR. The lunar-orbit-rendezvous method finally gained some traction a month later, during another committee meeting, when direct ascent’s Nova began losing steam as a viable option. Houbolt

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copy of his remarks. On July 11, Jim Webb—who had originally been a supporter of direct ascent—made the announcement: NASA had selected the lunar-orbit-rendezvous method for the job of landing men on the moon. For Houbolt, it was vindication, finally, for what would come to be seen as eminent

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had gone to runner-up McDonnell; Grumman had been judged too busy with other military aircraft commitments. But the firm’s engineers had been studying lunar-orbit rendezvous long before NASA had selected that mode in July 1962—in May 1960, Grumman representatives had had a meeting with Bob Gilruth, Max Faget, and

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to their feet, screaming and shouting. Von Braun, with tears in his eyes, turned to Houbolt, the man who had crusaded so tirelessly for the lunar-orbit rendezvous. He gave him an okay sign and said, “Thank you, John.” Chapter Seventeen Moondust We were lucky. Flight controller Glynn Lunney Somewhere on the southwestern

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Pioneers in Their Own Words. Los Ranchos, NM: Rio Grande Books, 2014. Hansen, James R. Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous Concept. Monographs in Aerospace History, no. 4. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1995. ———. First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. New York: Simon and

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, MA, September 14, 1960. von Braun, Wernher. “Concluding Remarks by Dr. Wernher von Braun about Mode Selection for the Lunar Landing Program,” June 7, 1962, Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous File, NASA History Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. Other Friedlander, Charles D. and Diane M. Friedlander. Chuck and Diane Friedlander Memoirs. Privately published manuscript

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during Gemini 10 more difficult than he’d expected. John Houbolt, an engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, was the leading proponent of the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode of landing on the moon when almost everyone else doubted it could work. His tireless evangelizing for LOR eventually won over even his harshest

Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer · 2 Jun 2014 · 477pp · 165,458 words

say, “That’s no good.” The hostility of others was intense. There was no question that in terms of economy of performance, the idea of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was clearly superior to Earth Orbit Rendezvous, but more than bureaucratic rigidity was at stake. One can assume that a number of the most practical

Case for Mars

by Robert Zubrin · 27 Jun 2011 · 437pp · 126,860 words

electriciy for one hour. kWh: The total amount of energy associated with the use of one kilowatt for one hour. LEO: Low Earth orbit. LOR: Lunar orbit rendezvous. LOX: Liquid oxygen. MAV: Mars ascent vehicle. Methanation reaction: A chemical reaction forming methane. In the Mars Direct mission, the methanation reaction is the Sabatier

Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure

by Dan Parry · 22 Jun 2009 · 370pp · 100,856 words

the Moon – an idea that 'horrified' Low.15 Direct, to the point of being blunt, Houbolt refused to let the idea drop. He suggested that lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) required only a very small capsule to be sent to the surface of the Moon. Unencumbered by the resources necessary for a six-day

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon

by James Schefter · 2 Jan 2000 · 366pp · 119,981 words

’d been studying rendezvous in space, and with some of the people working for him, John Houbolt came up with something new. He called it lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), and everyone who heard about it thought he was nuts. In the LOR scheme, it only took one large rocket from Wernher von Braun

Amazing Stories of the Space Age

by Rod Pyle · 21 Dec 2016

Apollo program, in which the same craft that left Earth would land on the moon and return the crew to Earth. NASA later adopted the “lunar orbit rendezvous” approach, with a separate crew capsule and lunar lander, both of which were single-use spacecraft. The air force, of course, wanted a winged vehicle

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992

by Rick Houston and J. Milt Heflin · 27 Sep 2015 · 472pp · 141,591 words

, May 25, 1961, Section IX: Space.” NASA, 24 May 2004. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/features/jfk_speech_text.html#.UtAEN7QSiN8. O’Brien, Frank. “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous.” Apollo Flight Journal. Last updated 1 January 2005. http://history.nasa.gov/afj/loressay.htm. Ong, Elwin C. “Profile Apollo: Hugh Blair-Smith.” NASA Office

John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

by John M. Logsdon · 15 Dec 2010 · 306pp · 36,032 words

, Jr. is partially visible behind von Braun. Most of those in this photograph participated in a brief but spirited debate about the wisdom of the lunar-orbit rendezvous approach to the lunar landing mission (NASA photograph). heavy fuel and even heavier heat shield required for the return to Earth, it could be much

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C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous Concept, NASA, Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 4, 1995. Houbolt’s letter is reprinted in Logsdon with Launius, Exploring the Unknown, Vol. VII, 522–530