Planning for a Lunar Landing Mission

Beginning in October 1960, NASA had begun to investigate in a preliminary fashion the technological and budgetary requirements for a lunar landing program. After an interim report on this planning effort at a January 5, 1961, meeting of NASA’s Space Exploration Program Council, a small group led by NASA’s program chief for manned space flight George Low was char­tered to continue further investigation into those requirements. The basic objective of Low’s group at that time was to answer the question: “What is NASA’s Manned Lunar Landing Program?”41

Low submitted his group’s fifty-one page report on February 7. Two methods for accomplishing the lunar landing mission were examined: “direct ascent,” i. e., launching on one very large rocket the spacecraft, fuel, and other equipment needed to land on the Moon and return safely to Earth, and “rendezvous,” i. e., launching separately on smaller boosters the various elements required and assembling them in Earth orbit before departing for the Moon. Significantly, the group concluded that “no invention or break­through is believed to be required to insure the over-all feasibility of safe lunar flight.” An initial mission to the Moon would be possible in the 1968­1970 period with an average cost of $700 million per year for ten years, or a total of $7 billion. The report noted that the plan it presented “does not represent a ‘crash’ program, but rather it represents a vigorous development of technology. The program objectives might be met earlier with higher ini­tial funding, and with some calculated risks.”42

Low’s report and the supporting work done by NASA and its contractors on preliminary design of the three-person Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn C-2 launcher (at this point in time, the Nova launcher was only in the early conceptual design phase) would be important to the confidence of the NASA leadership in the following weeks as they responded to President Kennedy’s request for a mission that would give the United States an opportunity to claim space leadership. Between NASA’s 1959 choice of a lunar mission as the long-term objective of its human space flight program and Low’s February 1961 report, NASA had indeed laid the technological foundation for what John Kennedy would soon call “a great new American enterprise.”