Author’s preface

For millennia human beings have peered at the Moon in the sky and wondered what it might be. Within months of its establishment on 1 October 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration set out to develop a program of robotic lunar exploration. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy raised the stakes by challenging his nation to land a man on the Moon within that decade. The resulting Apollo program dominated the agency’s activities throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

It is impractical to cover all the strands of this effort in a single volume in equal detail. Nor can any given strand be properly appreciated in isolation. My approach is therefore to write a series of books, each of which applies a magnifying glass to a certain number of strands and glosses over others. This book focuses on what was known about the Moon at the dawn of the space age and details the robotic projects that paved the way for the first Apollo lunar landing, in particular the Surveyors that soft-landed to investigate the physical and chemical nature of the lunar surface and the Lunar Orbiters sent to reconnoitre possible landing sites.

As such, this book complements: Apollo – The Definitive Sourcebook, which was compiled with Richard W. Orloff and supplements an account of how the Apollo program was organised with the minutiae of each flight; How NASA Learned to Fly in Space – An Exciting Account of the Gemini Missions, which explains the key contribution that the Gemini crews made to the success of Apollo; and The First Men on the Moon – The Story of Apollo 11, which covers that mission from start to finish. In Exploring the Moon – The Apollo Expeditions, which I recently reissued in enlarged format, I detailed what the astronauts of each mission did whilst on the lunar surface. It also complements the excellent To a Rocky Moon – A Geologist’s History of Lunar Exploration by Donald E. Wilhelms, and the International Atlas of Lunar Exploration by Philip J. Stooke.

I used the mission reports as my primary source of information – there are many thousands of pages available on the NASA Technical Report Server. Millions of dollars were spent developing and flying the vehicles used to take close-up pictures of the Moon and, like the mission reports, until recently they remained in archives. I have assembled some of the contiguous photographic sequences taken by the Lunar Orbiters to illustrate the process by which the site for the first Apollo landing was selected. To my knowledge, they have never previously been made available to the public in this form. I have also freely intermixed units of measure, largely following the choice of the appropriate mission reports. Unless stated otherwise, all times are GMT in 24-hour format. Launch, parking orbit, midcourse and terminal phase times are usually specified to the nearest second, but for a Surveyor spacecraft’s powered descent the event times are specified to several decimal places.

In the 1960s NASA was a young and aggressive agency which embodied the ‘can do’ spirit of America at that time in tackling audacious engineering challenges with a tremendous sense of urgency – motivated by the desire to be the first to explore a new world. This is an account of a strand of that story that is often reduced to a few paragraphs in popular histories.

David M. Harland Kelvinbridge, Glasgow January 2009