Apollo was America's program to land men on the moon and get them
safely back to the earth. In May 1961 President Kennedy gave the
signal for planning and developing the machines to take men to that
body. This decision, although bold and startling at the time, was
not made at random nor did it lack a sound engineering base.
Subcommittees of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
(NACA), predecessor of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), had regularly surveyed aeronautical needs
and pointed out problems for immediate resolution and specific
areas for advanced research. After NASA's creation in October 1958,
its leaders (many of them former NACA officials) continued to
operate in this fashion and, less than a year later, set up a group
to study what the agency should do in near earth and deep space
exploration. Among the items listed by that group was a lunar
landing, a proposal also discussed in circles outside NASA as a
means for achieving and demonstrating technological supremacy in
space. From the time Russia launched its first Sputnik in October
1957, many Americans had viewed the moon as a logical goal. A
two-nation space race subsequently made that destination America's
national objective for the 1960s. America had a program, Project
Mercury, to put man in low-earth orbit and recover him safely. In
July 1960 NASA announced plans to follow Mercury with a program,
later named Apollo, to fly men around the moon. Soon thereafter,
several industrial firms were awarded contracts to study the
feasibility of such an enterprise. The companies had scarcely
finished this task when the Russians scored again, orbiting the
first space traveler, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on 12 April 1961.
Three weeks later the Americans succeeded in launching Astronaut
Alan Shepard into a suborbital arc. These events and other
pressures to get America moving provided the popular, political,
and technological foundations upon which President Kennedy could
base his appeal for support from the Congress and the American
people for the Apollo program. The Apollo story has many pieces:
How and why did it start? What made it work? What did it
accomplish? What did it mean? Some of its visible (and some not so
visible) parts the launch vehicles, special facilities,
administration, Skylab program, Apollo Soyuz Test Project, as
examples, have been recorded by the NASA History Office and some
have not. A single volume treating all aspects of Apollo, whatever
they were, must await the passage of time to permit a fair
perspective. At that later date, this manuscript may seem narrow in
scope and perhaps it is. But among present readers, particularly
those who were Apollo program participants there are some who argue
that the text is too broad and that their specialties receive short
shrift. Moreover, some top NASA leaders during Apollo's times
contend, perhaps rightly, that the authors were not familiar with
all the nuances of some of the accounts set down here. Chariots for
Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft begins with the
creation of NASA itself and with the definition of a manned space
flight program to follow Mercury. It ends with Apollo 11, when
America attained its goal of the 1960s, landing the first men on
the moon and returning them to the earth. The focal points of this
story are the spacecraft the command and service modules and the
lunar module.
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