What Do We Do after Apollo?

Even before we made detailed plans for including science on the Apollo mis­sions, we undertook planning and analysis for missions that would come later. When I joined NASA in 1963, this planning was being done in Tom Evans’s office under the name Apollo Logistics Support System (ALSS), implying a program that would come after the Apollo missions but would capitalize on the Apollo hardware then being designed. Post-Apollo programs were given other names in later years as management attempted to get a commitment to con­tinue lunar missions after the initial Apollo landings.

By late 1963, except for the effort that went into the Sonett Report, little had been done to fill the void in Apollo science planning. And many in NASA claimed that no void existed. The Apollo program had only one objective: to land men on the Moon and return them safely. The astronauts would probably take a few pictures, though no camera had yet been selected. They might pick up a few rocks, but tools for doing this were not under development, nor were we designing the special boxes essential for storing such samples on the return trip. A few forward-looking scientists were beginning to think about these con­cerns, but no one was receiving NASA funds to develop the equipment needed. Post-Apollo planning was an entirely different matter. Tom Evans’s office was already spending NASA funds to address what we should do on the Moon after the initial landings. His group and others in Advanced Manned Missions who were looking ahead had initiated studies at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) that led to the ten-volume MSFC report Lunar Logistic System. This effort was directed at MSFC by Joseph de Fries of the Aero Astrodynamics Laboratory, but it included contributions from other MSFC organizations.

In the fall of 1963, less than six years before the first Apollo Moon landing would take place, no timelines had yet been developed to tell us how long the astronauts would, or could, stay on the lunar surface. Payload numbers for the science equipment were not firmed up and varied from the 100 to 200 pounds estimated for the Sonett Report to the ‘‘back of the envelope’’ 250 pounds allotted later. We all assumed it would be difficult to get a larger allocation until all the Apollo systems had been tested and flown and had their performance evaluated. In spite of the many uncertainties and the lack of firm numbers, we took it as given that the landings (number undefined) would be successful and that the myriad Apollo systems would function as advertised.

Our job was not to question any of the Apollo assumptions. Another office in Advanced Manned Missions, under the rubric of supporting research and technology, was responsible for developing alternative ways to ensure mission success. Not only did we assume success, we were charged with expanding the capabilities of the basic Apollo hardware far beyond the original intent. For example, how could we upgrade the lunar excursion module (LEM) to carry a much larger payload than currently planned? How could we extend the time that the command and service module (CSM) could stay in lunar orbit? How could we increase the potential landing area accessible to the LEM (restricted for the first landings to the Moon’s nearside, central longitude, equatorial re­gion) so that we could explore what appeared to be critical geological sites far from the planned Apollo landing zone? And would it be possible to land a modified, automated LEM, turning it into a cargo carrier (LEM truck) in order to bring large scientific and logistics payloads to the Moon? All these questions and many more were already under study when I joined the office. (Later in the program the term lunar excursion module was shortened to lunar module, LM, but at this time LEM was still the preferred name.)

The missing ingredient in all this planning was an explanation for why we wanted to stay longer on the lunar surface and why we needed to modify the Apollo hardware to carry bigger payloads. How long should we stay? How big a payload? It became my job to get answers from the ongoing studies. At the end of July 1963, as one of his last actions at headquarters, Gene Shoemaker had sent a letter to Wernher von Braun, the Marshall Space Flight Center director, asking MSFC to suggest what types of scientific activities should be undertaken on the ALSS missions. Verne Fryklund, as Shoemaker’s successor at NASA, continued this effort, and I in turn inherited this inquiry when I informally joined his staff.

After meeting Paul Lowman in Fryklund’s office, I quickly learned that he shared my enthusiasm about studying and exploring the Moon. Not having been exposed to normal Washington turf battles and jealousies, it seemed quite natural that I ask Paul to work with me informally on some of the projects I had begun. Paul had already made a name for himself by convincing the Mercury astronauts to use Hasselblad cameras on their flights to photograph the Earth’s surface. This was no mean accomplishment, since these former test pilots were much more interested in flying and monitoring spacecraft systems than in being photographers. Most of the astronauts eventually enjoyed taking photos, especially when they were published extensively in newspapers and magazines. At that time Life had an exclusive agreement with the astronauts to publish first-person accounts of the missions, and a few beautiful full-color photos of the Earth appeared in the articles that followed each Mercury flight. As a result of this success, Paul continued to coach the upcoming Gemini astronauts in photography.

One of the attractive aspects of working at NASA in those early days was that staff members were given great freedom to attack whatever problem they un­covered, without bureaucratic red tape and worry about turf. Paul had orig­inally accepted his temporary headquarters assignment in order to work with Gene Shoemaker, so with Gene’s departure, the reorganization of Fryklund’s office, and the arrival of Will Foster, the timing was right. Thus we began a long professional friendship that endures today.

By the time I joined Evans’s small team in 1963, we already had the results of some preliminary studies on expanding the versatility of the Apollo hardware. The MSFC Lunar Logistic System study had examined the hardware then under development for Apollo and documented its inherent flexibility. With what we claimed would be minor modifications, it would be possible to land the LEM at selected sites with no crew on board. Such a LEM could then be a cargo ship carrying as much as seven thousand pounds to the lunar surface, replacing ascent fuel and other equipment not needed for a one-way, unmanned trip. A LEM with this capacity could carry living quarters, large science payloads, or other types of equipment depending on the mission. It seemed that a crew of two astronauts, arriving in another modified LEM and landing close to one or more unmanned logistics LEMs, could spend as much as two weeks on the Moon by either transferring to the earlier-landed LEM or using other payloads that had preceded them.

Similar studies of the CSM showed that it could be kept in lunar orbit long enough to support a two-week lunar stay. In addition, remote-sensing payloads could be carried in one of the CSM’s bays to map the lunar surface in various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, an undertaking that was receiving more and more backing and attention.

Most of my office colleagues were engineers with degrees in electrical, aero­nautical, or mechanical engineering and little training in earth sciences. This background was mirrored by NASA’s senior management. We decided the best way to convince our bosses that there would be exciting and important inves­tigations for the astronauts to undertake on the Moon (requiring many days and a wide variety of equipment) would be to illustrate these tasks with ter­restrial analogies and describe the type of fieldwork and experiments required on Earth to unravel its own history.

Drawing on the Sonett Report and our own knowledge and experience, Paul and I first visited the rock collection at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. We borrowed rock samples of various types that illustrated the Earth’s geological diversity and the complex geological and geophysical situations we believed would be encountered on the Moon. With visible evidence of how a planetary body (the Earth) had evolved, we developed a rudimentary ‘‘show and tell’’—a short course in terrestrial geology and geophysics for NASA deci­sion makers—and extrapolated this lesson to the Moon. We hoped our rock collection, along with maps, photos, cross sections, and such, would stimulate their interest and demonstrate that what we were proposing was real and im­portant. We selected igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rock samples, later augmented by a few specimens collected at Meteor Crater, Arizona, that showed how a meteorite impact could make rocks look much different than before they were struck. In 1963 so little was known of the physical characteris­tics of the lunar surface that we felt free to use almost any type of rock to tell our story. Armed with our teaching materials, we put together a half-hour lecture designed around passing out our rock collection to the audience to make particular points and—we hoped—elicit questions. We started with my office colleagues, honed the presentation, and later lectured to senior staff. Tom Evans and E. Z. Gray were impressed with the story we put together. We were ready to take our show on the road and present it along with recent study results con­firming that the astronauts might be able to stay on the Moon for two weeks deploying sophisticated science payloads.

On December 23, 1963, after just four months of getting our story together, Evans was asked to brief a prestigious audience: Nicholas E. Golovin, a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), and staff from the Office of Science and Technology (OST). Golovin had been a senior manager at NASA before going to PSAC. He had earned a reputation as a stern, no­nonsense leader in NASA’s early days when he chaired a committee to review the Apollo launch vehicle options and became involved in the internal debate on selecting lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) as the preferred mission mode. Tom was apprehensive about the briefing, which was designed to inform PSAC about our thinking on post-Apollo missions. Ed Andrews and I went with Tom, but because of Golovin’s reputation we were told just to listen unless Tom asked us to answer a question.

I thought the briefing went well, and I only responded to a few “geological” questions directed my way. Golovin asked several questions, some in a peremp­tory tone that I assumed was his normal manner. Donald Steininger, from OST, asked a few questions on classifying rocks, obviously trying to understand how much sampling would be necessary to understand the Moon’s history. Tom saw the meeting more negatively. He didn’t think we had convinced our audience of the need for extended lunar exploration. As it turned out, Tom’s instincts were right: after President Kennedy’s death, the Johnson administration never fully embraced post-Apollo lunar exploration.

Of course, not knowing in 1963 and 1964 what events would take place that might dash our plans, we charged ahead and prepared for the big show, a briefing on our vision of post-Apollo lunar exploration for George Mueller, Tom and E. Z. Gray’s boss. Mueller, a former professor of electrical engineering, was a slender man with dark hair combed straight back, whose thick, black- rimmed glasses gave him an owlish look. In the meetings I had attended he was soft-spoken and deliberative. I was looking forward to this chance to brief him. Mueller’s management style was somewhat unusual compared with that of other managers I had known, and in the years ahead it set the tone for the Apollo program.

After we moved to 600 Independence Avenue (across the street from a parking lot that later was the site of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum), briefings and status reviews for Mueller were held in Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF) conference room 425. The room was set up to hold forty to fifty, with Mueller and senior OMSF management seated in the front row before three back-projected screens. A lectern for the presenter was usually placed to the audience’s left of the screens. Several overhead microphones let the pre­senter prompt the projectionist for the next vugraph or slide. Al Zito, a civil servant transferred from the navy, ruled the seas behind the screens. You soon learned that if you wanted a smooth presentation, Al had to understand your needs. With an assistant, he would work the three screens like an orchestra conductor, never missing a beat even if the presenter lost his place or questions disrupted the flow. Al became an OMSF institution. He could have written a funny book about NASA in the years leading up to the first Apollo flights, for he was privy to more senior-level decision making than almost anyone else. Such a book could have included the faults, foibles, and stumbles of many senior managers unprepared for the grilling they got on the stage in room 425.

We had a small art department to develop presentation material for OMSF offices. Housed in the basement of 600 Independence Avenue, it was run by Peter Robinson, who had a full-time staff of six or seven artists and technicians. Pete was a true NASA treasure-unflappable in the face of impossible deadlines yet smiling and friendly and somehow always delivering the goods. I came to know Pete and his team well over the years. I often spent hours in Pete’s office along with Jay Holmes, who worked on Mueller’s staff to develop presentations, sketching and revising new material for briefing senior management. Mueller had a special ability to make a flawless presentation with minimum preparation before audiences of all descriptions, keeping them spellbound with the colorful and exciting pictures we and others provided. Every program manager soon learned to keep a file drawer full of up-to-date vugraphs of his project, ready at a moment’s notice to either give a presentation or provide material for someone else to present.

Although the conference room had microphones to cue the projectionist, there was no way to amplify what was being said for those in back. During and after presentations, Mueller and his staff would ask questions and discuss the matter at hand, with Mueller taking the lead. His voice was soft and low, and since he seldom raised it, even during contentious debates, everyone would be absolutely silent so as not to miss what was being said in the front of the room. In spite of straining to hear, those of us in the cheap seats often could not get the gist of the discussion.

After the meeting we would discreetly mill around in the corridor outside asking ‘‘What did he say?’’ about a particular subject of interest. We usually had to ask two or three people before we got the whole answer, since even those seated closer might not have heard everything. I have often wondered if Mueller knew about these sessions and purposely pitched his voice low to keep everyone focused and eliminate unwanted questions on his time. Whether or not it was a ploy, his meetings usually zipped along, unlike those run by many other man­agers I have worked with.

The staff had two strategies for briefing Mueller. During the regular work­week we tried to schedule our briefings early in the morning, because as the day wore on, even if you were on his schedule, he would often be called away for urgent telephone calls or for short or long discussions back in his office. His calendar was always filled, so if you didn’t finish your briefing in the time allotted it was difficult to get back on his agenda. We quickly learned to schedule important decision-making meetings on Saturday or Sunday, when interrup­tions were at a minimum and we could talk in a more relaxed environment. NASA Manned Space Flight under Mueller became a seven-day-a-week job, and the lights burned late in most offices at headquarters as we tried to keep up with the rapidly evolving program. The same was true, I know, at the NASA centers.

Our briefing for Mueller was carried out in an atmosphere less formal than usual and with fewer attendees. We made our case for longer staytimes and larger payloads, and since I was at the front for my presentation, this time I had no trouble hearing his questions. Our briefing and props succeeded beyond our expectations; eventually E. Z. Gray felt comfortable enough with our story that he borrowed our presentation for his own briefings, and Mueller soon began to lobby for post-Apollo missions. Over the next two years, as more and more in­formation on the Moon’s characteristics became available through new studies and the unmanned missions, we improved our story and eventually made our presentation, without the rocks, at national scientific meetings and symposia.

In the spring of 1964, as we continued to spread the gospel of lunar explora­tion, Tom Evans scheduled a trip to Houston to discuss our ideas and plans for post-Apollo exploration with some of the staff at the newly formed Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC; later named the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center). Many of the new arrivals at MSC had been transferred from the NASA Langley Research Center, and one of the more senior was Maxime ‘‘Max’’ A. Faget. Max was a feisty aeronautical engineer who had been a member of the NASA Space Task Group, the source of many of the initial Project Mercury program man­agers and other senior managers for the fledgling NASA. In 1959 he served on the Goett Committee that recommended increasingly difficult missions, from Project Mercury to Mars-Venus landings, including manned lunar landings. With this background we thought he would be interested in and supportive of our plans. Max’s title was director of engineering and development, and as one of the designers of the Mercury capsule he now led the MSC engineering teams responsible for the design of everything from the LEM to space suits.

Tom took three of us with him to Houston to be available for questions from Max and whoever else he might invite to the briefing. At this time the MSC staff was still small. Some members, including Max, were housed in a building near downtown Houston while their permanent offices were being built in a cow pasture at Clear Lake, about twenty miles southeast of Houston. Max brought about six staff members to our briefing, which Tom Evans gave in its entirety. He described in detail the type of tasks we thought would be needed after the initial Apollo landings to answer fundamental questions about the Moon’s origin and explained the value of using the Moon as a lunar science base. To carry them out, Tom explained, would require making changes to the projected Apollo hardware so that astronauts could remain on the Moon for weeks at a time and so that large logistical payloads could be carried. As the briefing progressed, there were no questions from Max or any of his staff. Finally, after about an hour of talking, Tom completed the briefing and asked for comments or questions. After a short pause, Max, a short, stocky man with a receding hairline and a bulldog demeanor, turned in his swivel chair and asked in a raspy voice, of no one in particular, ‘‘Who thought up these ideas, some high-school student?’’

Despite his look of great consternation, Tom calmly tried to explain how we had arrived at our position, but it was clear that Max wasn’t interested. Perhaps he had more pressing matters on his mind, such as the first Gemini program launch, which would soon be announced. Perhaps he knew that these ideas were based in part on work done at MSFC, a rival for management of pieces of the Apollo program. The briefing ended in some disarray because of Max’s attitude. We quickly left and flew back to Washington, dismayed at our inability to get a more positive response. This was my first encounter with Max Faget and some of the MSC science staff, and it signaled the beginning of a long and often contentious relationship with some MSC offices that lasted until the final Apollo flight splashed down.

No story about NASA would be complete without some discussion of bud­gets. There have been several accounts, perhaps apocryphal, of how NASA administrator James Webb and his staff arrived at a dollar figure for how much the Apollo program would cost American taxpayers. The most common story had it that his managers told him it would take $12 billion or $13 billion to achieve a manned lunar landing and return, so he made an appointment to discuss the program and budget that he was recommending with President Kennedy. On the way to the White House in his Checkers limousine, a modified version of the popular taxicab (he was the only agency head to use such inele­gant transportation, which he found spacious and easy to get in and out of), based on his experience as director of the Bureau of the Budget and his exper­tise in dealing with big government programs, he doubled the estimate to $25 billion. Whether or not the genesis of this number is true, his projection was on the mark, and the Apollo program eventually was completed for almost pre­cisely that amount.

Webb and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, were the only political appointees at NASA. Webb had been appointed by President Kennedy at the beginning of his term to succeed NASA’s first administrator, T. Keith Glennan. Webb was a lawyer who came to NASA from the private sector, but he had been a senior government official in previous administrations and still maintained close ties to important political figures. During his tenure at NASA he was admired for his political astuteness and his ability to move Congress and administrations in the directions he chose. As the Mr. Outside of NASA, he smoothed the way for the agency to grow and prosper during the hectic first years of the Apollo era.

I don’t recall any meetings with Webb or Dryden—I was much too junior for such exalted company—but I did attend many meetings over the years with Bob Seamans, the associate administrator and number three man in the manage­ment pecking order. His background was very different from Webb’s. He had spent most of his career at MIT, first as a professor and later working on a variety of military projects at what was then called the Instrumentation Labora­tory. In his autobiography, Aiming at Targets,1 Seamans recounts being re­cruited by Glennan in 1960 to be NASA’s ‘‘general manager,’’ running the day – to-day operations. After Webb succeeded Glennan, Seamans continued to fill the general manager’s position and became NASA’s Mr. Inside. It was in that role that I first met him soon after I joined NASA. I’m sure he wouldn’t remem­ber that meeting, and I don’t recall the subject (although it probably had something to do with lunar exploration), but I remember one exchange vividly. During the presentations, I asked a few questions. Seamans turned abruptly in my direction and said in a pained voice, ‘‘This is my meeting.’’ I may not remember what was covered at the meeting, but those words are etched in my memory. His outburst quickly put a lowly GS-13 in his place, and from that point on I only listened.

Under Seamans’s direction NASA quickly became a polished management team. He instituted comprehensive monthly status reviews (general manage­ment status reviews) where he presided. Every aspect of all the programs was reviewed, problems were thrashed out, and actions were assigned. It was almost impossible to hide a problem in such a forum, and the business of the agency moved ahead briskly. Eventually Seamans was appointed deputy administrator, and he stayed at NASA until January 1968, the eve of Apollo’s biggest successes, for which he could take major credit. In 1974 President Gerald Ford appointed Seamans to lead a new government entity, the Energy Research and Develop­ment Agency, and I had the pleasure of working for him again, only this time in a much more senior role.

Only a small fraction of the $25 billion Webb asked for found its way into the Advanced Manned Missions budget or its predecessor offices. It has been diffi­cult, thirty-five years after the fact, to reconstruct these budgets from existing NASA documentation and from my own files. But it appears that from fiscal year 1961 to FY 1968 our offices received about $100 million out of the overall Manned Space Flight budget. These dollars funded a variety of studies: manned lunar and planetary missions, vehicle studies, Earth orbital missions, systems engineering, and other special studies, all related to programs that might follow a successful Apollo landing. In turn, Evans was allocated his small portion of these overall budgets for his office’s studies. By FY 1964 he had received a little over $7 million, which he had divided among five competing study areas, and increased funding came our way over the next few years. In the first two and a half years that I worked for Tom and his successors (calendar year 1963 to CY 1965), we had access to about $8 million to start obtaining some hard numbers that would back up the ‘‘how long, how big’’ assumptions for the ALSS missions that we grandly threw around in our briefings and rock lectures. In addition to contractor studies, this funding included a few hundred thousand dollars that was transferred to the United States Geographical Survey (USGS) in FY 1964 and FY 1965, to begin geological and geophysical field studies of how to carry out specific operations during lunar missions with long staytimes. In the early 1960s, you could get a lot of bang for your NASA buck.

My first contractor study was undertaken toward the end of 1963 by Martin Marietta. The company had been in competition with Grumman to build the lunar excursion module, and in the final selection Grumman won. During the competition, Martin had built a full-scale mock-up of its concept of what a LEM would look like. Not surprisingly, since they were both bidding to the same specifications, the Martin concept looked very similar to the winning Grumman model. This mock-up now sat in a high-bay building at the Martin plant in Middle River, Maryland, near Baltimore. Disappointed by the loss, and learning of our activities, a Martin manager came to my office one day to see if there was any interest in using this equipment. Having just completed a param­etric analysis of contingency experiments for Apollo, I saw the opportunity to determine, in a preliminary fashion, what difficulties the astronauts might have in making observations from the LEM once they landed on the lunar surface and before they set foot outside. In the back of our minds was the fear that after a successful touchdown something might keep them from getting out on the lunar surface.

Because Martin had the only look-alike version of a LEM, I was able to justify a sole-source contract, and one was soon in place. As part of the contract, Martin did its best, within our funding limitations, to simulate a lunar surface surrounding the LEM mock-up on the floor of the high-bay building. Tons of ashes, sand, and other material were poured on the floor, and we also scattered various types of rocks in the loose, finer-grained material, including some of those we had borrowed from the Smithsonian. To simulate lighting conditions the astronauts might encounter on the Moon, we illuminated the simulated surface with light ranging from low to intense and varied the angle to duplicate the changing sun angles they might confront depending on when during a lunar day they landed.

Since this was to be a simulation of human factors as much as geological conditions, the contract was managed by the Martin human factors department under the direction of Milton Grodsky. The “astronauts” were Martin em­ployees selected by the company. Paul Lowman and I gave them some rudimen­tary geological training, concentrating on how to make visual observations, provide verbal descriptions using geological terms, and take photographs from the LEM windows to show the nature of the simulated lunar surface. The

Martin test subjects volunteered to spend three or four days isolated in the LEM mock-up, eating and sleeping in the confined space and able to communicate with the test engineers only by radio. The living conditions inside the Martin mock-up, though somewhat uncomfortable, were considerably better than those faced by Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. ‘‘Buzz’’ Aldrin Jr. five years later during the first lunar landing and by astronauts in later missions. Armstrong and Aldrin, for example, didn’t get much rest during their twenty-hour stay. When they tried to sleep after returning to the LEM from extravehicular ac­tivity (EVA) on the surface, Armstrong had to rest on top of the motor casing of the ascent stage rocket, while Aldrin curled up in a confined space on the LEM’s floor. Neither slept soundly, and Armstrong perhaps not at all. We were easier on our test subjects; we gutted the interior of the mock-up, and each test ‘‘astronaut’’ had enough space to sleep on a thin mattress on the floor.

The first problem was how to photograph and describe the scene outside the LEM, which had only two small windows, both facing in about the same direction. With this limited view, less than half the lunar surface would be visible if the astronauts could not get out. The LEM also had an overhead hatch to allow them to enter it from the CSM while in lunar orbit, and in that hatch was a small window designed to permit star field sightings, if needed, to up­date the LEM’s guidance and navigation system. But on the lunar surface this window would face only the dark sky above the Moon. The LEM would be equipped with a small telescope that could be operated from inside to assist in the star sightings. We simulated opening the hatch on the lunar surface, with one of the test subjects standing in the opening to make observations. That worked quite well, and we were confident that if this was allowed we could get a good description of the landing site supplemented by panoramic photographs. But what if the astronauts couldn’t open the hatch or weren’t permitted to do so?

Perhaps we could adapt the telescope—design it to operate more like a periscope so they could scan the surface in all directions. Paul and I traveled to Boston to ask these questions at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory. The lab had the NASA contract to design the guidance and navigation control system for the CSM and LEM. The telescope was an integral part of the system, along with a sextant in the CSM. We spent the afternoon describing our Martin study and explaining the added value of designing the telescope so it could not only take star sightings but scan the surface and accept a handheld camera to let the astronauts photograph the full surface area of the landing site from within the LEM. The engineers thought this would be possible, but it would entail a major design change to the telescope. Since they were already having some trouble meeting contract objectives, we knew that asking for such a change, based on a perhaps unlikely contingency, went beyond our pay grade. I wrote a short report of our visit and then drafted a memo to George Mueller, for Homer Newell’s signature, requesting that modifications to the LEM periscope be con­sidered to permit terrain photography and visual observations of the lunar surface.2 I have no record of how this request was processed in OMSF, but the modifications were considered too extensive and costly, and the matter was dropped. We resurrected this idea some time later, but again it was not imple­mented, and fortunately such an instrument was never needed on any of the Apollo landing missions.

With the Martin Marietta contract under way, I started to lay plans for several other studies. The Sonett Report made it clear that we would need a geophysical station of undetermined design that could support five or six ex­periments. A drill that could extract core samples from deep below the lunar surface was another piece of equipment we believed the scientific community would eventually call for. After studying the first USGS geologic maps of the Kepler and Copernicus regions, traverses of tens of miles seemed necessary if we were to fully understand such large craters, some twenty and fifty miles in diameter. To work far beyond their immediate landing site, the astronauts would have to be mobile, and the more capable we could make a vehicle the more useful it would be. According to our limited understanding of the ongo­ing designs for the astronauts’ space suits and life-support backpacks, they would never be permitted to make such long traverses on foot; they would need a vehicle with a pressurized cab and full life support.

Our growing knowledge of the Moon suggested that the lunar surface might be stable, not subject to shaking and movement. If that was true, it would be easy to design astronomical devices to take advantage of this characteristic, perhaps by using small, symmetrical craters to support radio antennas or large mirrors. With no intervening atmosphere, telescopes operating on the lunar surface during the fourteen-day lunar nights might provide the best ‘‘seeing,’’ or ‘‘listening,’’ that astronomers could hope to find nearby in our solar system. We proposed to study such instruments for inclusion in the science payloads of these longer missions following the Apollo landings.

Compared with Apollo, where we were told there would be constraints on all the important exploration parameters such as payload weight, surface staytime, and site accessibility, we could think big. The biggest constraint to be removed was the limit on the payload we could send to the Moon’s surface. Instead of numbers like 250 pounds, we could plan around payloads of 7,000 pounds or more, which in turn could be used for any need we had. Experiments, life support, and transportation headed the list of items we would try to define so as to take advantage of the larger payloads.

As it was with Apollo, the astronauts’ safety was always uppermost in our thoughts as we laid these plans. Other self-imposed criteria required automat­ing as many jobs as possible to conserve the astronauts’ time. Lunar surface tasks would be designed to optimize their inherent ability to accomplish those aspects of exploration that humans do best: observing, describing, manipulat­ing complex equipment, and responding to the unexpected. We did not want them performing a lot of manual labor if it could be avoided. But we had to strike a delicate balance between automated functions and manual tasks, or supporters of unmanned exploration, both inside and outside NASA, would raise many questions and objections. Why go to the expense, not to mention risk, of sending astronauts if all they did was turn a switch and let a machine do the work? Switches could be turned on and off from Earth. Our office never thought this was a real challenge, since the astronauts’ unique abilities would always be their most important contribution toward exploring the Moon. A combination of automated equipment and hands-on tasks would be needed, and we took it for granted that exploration would proceed in this fashion.

Designing a drill for studying subsurface conditions (called logging) on the Moon and for taking subsurface core samples was a good example of how we eventually applied these criteria. On Earth these operations are labor intensive, requiring many types of laborers and technicians to carry out the wide variety of jobs each entails. Being familiar with all these tasks after spending many months at well sites in Colombia, I could see that new thinking would be required. Terrestrial drilling, logging, and coring equipment must be bulky and heavy to accommodate difficult drilling conditions and the constant rough handling encountered in the field.

Drilling on Earth has one other important characteristic that would be different on the Moon. Water or water-mud mixtures are normally pumped into a drill hole to cool the bit, bring the rock cuttings to the surface, and keep the hole from caving in. Where a water mixture cannot be used, air is circulated under high pressure to accomplish the same purposes. Either of these methods would be impractical on the Moon; we would have to find other ways. Since the primary purpose of drilling on the Moon would be to extract a core, we didn’t want astronauts to have to constantly oversee the drilling and coring. This added another dimension to whatever designs would be proposed: a highly reliable, semiautomated lunar core drill. We envisioned much more elegant equipment than that employed on Earth—probably to be used only once at each landing site and thus far different from traditional terrestrial designs.

With all these considerations to be dealt with, the next priority after we started the Martin study was to find a contractor who would do an overall analysis of science needs for the ALSS missions. This new study would generate first-order estimates of weights, volumes, and data transmission and power requirements for a suite of instruments selected by the government. This was my first attempt at writing a government request for quotation (RFQ), and I got help from my office and the NASA headquarters Procurement Office. The RFQ, called “Scientific Mission Support Study for ALSS,’’ focused on the scientific operations that could be done from a mobile laboratory carrying two astro­nauts. It was released in early 1964 from our headquarters office.

While I was writing this RFQ it became clear that managing contracts from headquarters would be difficult since we had so many studies to get under way. We needed to find a NASA center that would agree to manage them. Also, we reasoned that having a center take ownership of the studies had another advan­tage. The center would be a strong voice supporting our ideas at other NASA offices that might be skeptical of their importance when budget time rolled around and we were competing for scarce funds.

My few brief encounters with the MSC staff had not been encouraging. They were focused on Gemini and just beginning to think about Apollo science. As shown by our briefing to Faget, planning what should be done after Apollo was not on their agenda. In addition, in early 1964 I could not identify anyone I thought had the right background to manage the studies. Goddard Space Flight Center had built a strong earth sciences staff that could have taken on these studies, but they reported to the Office of Space Science and Applications, the wrong part of NASA. The Kennedy Space Center, although an OMSF center, did not seem to be an option, since its primary responsibility was to service a variety of launch vehicles and there were few earth scientists on the staff. That left the Marshall Space Flight Center, the remaining OMSF center, as my only choice. It turned out to be a most fortuitous final candidate. The studies initi­ated by our office and others in Advanced Manned Missions to improve the Apollo hardware had been undertaken by several MSFC organizations. Many MSFC staffers had worked on studies reported in the multivolume Lunar Logis­tic System.

Wernher von Braun, a German expatriate rocket genius, was the newly appointed MSFC director. He had just been reassigned from his position as director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the army’s Redstone Arsenal, located with MSFC in Huntsville, Ala­bama. At the end of World War II the army had brought more than 120 Ger­man engineers and scientists, led by von Braun, to the United States to improve the country’s rocket know-how. Some of this original group had been assigned to Cape Canaveral as well as Huntsville. With a perfect launch record for their rocket designs, they successfully launched the first United States satellite, and our rocket technology was progressing rapidly. Sending men to the Moon was to be their next challenge, which would include building the huge new Saturn V! MSFC was NASA’s largest center in terms of manpower, so the question became where to go in this organization, with which I had had no previous contact. The decision turned out to be easy, since the Research Projects Laboratory (RPL), under Ernst Stuhlinger, one of von Braun’s original team members, had been responsible for writing volume 10, Payloads, of the Lunar Logistic System re­port.3 This volume described science payloads that could be carried on modi­fied Apollo spacecraft, including many geophysical experiments.

After several phone calls I scheduled a meeting with James Downey, manager of the Special Projects Office in RPL; he and some of his staff had also contrib­uted to volume 10. Our first meeting took place in late 1963 and was marked by some careful bureaucratic dancing. Reflecting his center’s and his immediate boss’s cautious, Germanic approach to having someone from headquarters ask for a commitment of manpower and center resources, Jim wanted to know if my request represented a formal headquarters assignment of new duties for MSFC. I wasn’t prepared for such a pointed inquiry and knew I didn’t have the authority to say yes, so I hedged but assured him that our office had funds to support the studies I was asking him to manage.

Jim, a University of Alabama graduate, was an easygoing manager who commanded the respect of his unusual, multitalented conglomeration of scien­tists and engineers. He was eager to take on this new job, for so far his office had not received much funding for its studies. An important measure of a successful manager at NASA was how much funding he obtained and how many contracts he managed, so the promise of new funding was well received. But before he could agree it would have to be formally requested through the proper chan­nels. From my brief exposure to his staff, it appeared that they had the mix of skills needed to monitor the wide range of contractor studies we wanted to perform. I told Jim I would go back to Washington and start the paperwork. This meeting was the beginning of a long and productive relationship with Ernst Stuhlinger, Jim Downey, and their staffs as we undertook several studies that broke new ground for lunar exploration.

What did it mean when a NASA center managed programs or studies? There were many responsibilities. We met frequently to plan future procurements to be sure we all agreed on what the final products would be, and we would estimate the funds required and the schedules to be met by the contractors. Then MSFC would write the request for proposal (RFP), designate a contract monitor on Downey’s staff, establish a rather informal source selection com­mittee to evaluate the proposals, advertise the procurement in the Commerce Business Daily, release the RFP, evaluate the proposals received (with the evalua­tion documented in case of a protest from a rejected contractor), choose a win­ner or winners, award the contract, and then—the important part—monitor the contractor’s performance until the job was completed. The procedures we followed for these smaller contracts, although spelled out in NASA regulations, were nowhere near as precise as today’s requirements, which call for formally appointed source evaluation boards and source selection officials. Without this time-consuming bureaucratic red tape, we were able to move ahead quickly on our contracts.

In my mind the steps named above more than justified asking a center to help get the contracts under way; the centers had much more manpower avail­able for this cradle-to-grave job, as well as experience in directing the efforts of NASA’s growing number of contractors. The main responsibility of NASA headquarters staff was to develop the big-picture programs and run inter­ference with the administration and Congress on issues pertaining to budgets and policy, leaving the details of running the programs to the centers. In real­ity these distinctions weren’t so clear-cut, and the centers and headquarters worked together on all aspects of the programs. Contract management of advanced (paper) studies migrated more and more from headquarters to the centers. As NASA matured as an agency, the centers became powerful indepen­dent entities, supported by their homegrown political allies in Congress and the executive branch. This growing independence was one of the reasons friction developed between headquarters and MSC. Under von Braun, MSFC accepted headquarters direction more graciously; perhaps this smoother relationship was a reflection of MSFC’s confident corporate personality, embodied in the person of its director and enhanced by its established reputation in rocketry. MSC was the new kid on the block, attempting to prove that it knew how to get the job done but with a short track record. And it had no one with a reputation like von Braun’s to intervene if problems arose. Little by little, of course, MSC established this track record with the successful completion of the Mercury and Gemini programs, but this newfound confidence never translated to a smooth management relationship with our headquarters office in matters dealing with science.

Once MSFC agreed to manage our post-Apollo science studies, events moved rapidly. Contracts were signed in 1964 for the studies mentioned above, and soon afterward management of the ALSS Scientific Mission Support Study, won by the Bendix Aerospace Systems Division, was transferred to MSFC. Not all headquarters managers followed this practice; some liked to maintain con­trol of their programs by doing the day-to-day management. But the advan­tages of leaving contract management to MSFC were evident from the start. Small study contracts could be managed by headquarters staff, since they re­sulted only in paper, but once prototype hardware became deliverable, only a center could supply the management expertise and resources needed. Several of our contracts required delivery of engineering models or “breadboards” of proposed equipment as well as detailed analyses.

In June 1964, along with some reorganization at headquarters, the ALSS program was modified and given a new name, Apollo Extension System (AES). The new name was meant to convey a different message than Apollo Logistics Support System; AES was to be a new program based more closely on Apollo but not requiring the extensive hardware modifications envisioned for ALSS. There would still be a greater potential to study the Moon, both on the surface and from lunar orbit. We could still plan on dual launches of an automated LEM shelter-laboratory and a LEM taxi to carry the astronauts to the surface and return them to rendezvous with a CSM built for extended staytime. Our

strategy, as we had planned for ALSS, centered on the astronauts’ transferring to a shelter-laboratory after landing and conducting their extravehicular activities from there. AES studies also included using a wide variety of instruments aboard the Apollo CSM in Earth and lunar orbit to survey and map the surfaces of these two bodies. The orbital studies would now be managed in the Ad­vanced Manned Missions office as a continuation of the work initiated earlier by Pete Badgley.

In early 1964, President Johnson asked NASA to develop long-range goals for the agency and, by implication, the nation. Homer Newell, as was the custom, quickly asked the National Academy of Sciences to help provide a response focusing on space science. In 1961 the Academy’s Space Science Board (SSB) had recommended that “scientific exploration of the Moon and planets should be clearly stated as the ultimate objective of the U. S. space program for the foreseeable future.’’ Now, three years later, Harry Hess, chairman of the Space Science Board, wrote to Newell indicating that a change in objectives was appropriate. Planetary exploration, starting with unmanned exploration of Mars and eventually leading to manned exploration, should be the new goal.4 The SSB stated that Mars “offers the best possibility in our solar system for shedding light on extraterrestrial life.’’ It was ready to concede that the Apollo program would be successful, thus the new emphasis on planetary exploration. But the SSB also suggested some alternatives that included extensive manned lunar exploration leading to lunar bases. These recommendations, which we took as an endorsement of the studies we were pursuing, were eventually incor­porated into the report that was sent to the president. In the fall of 1964 we believed our programs would soon be officially embraced by the administra­tion, and this belief was reinforced a few months later when the president publicly declared that ‘‘we intend to not only land on the moon but to also explore the moon.’’5 We waited in vain for a formal start. Instead Johnson focused on his Great Society programs and, increasingly, on the war in Viet­nam. There were three more years of growing budgets for Manned Space Flight to fulfill the lunar landing mandate, but NASA’s overall funding peaked in FY 1965 and thereafter began to decline.

At the end of 1964 Ed Andrews and I were transferred from Tom Evans’s office to a new office called Special Studies under the direction of William Taylor. I was not pleased with this move; the mission of this new office was poorly defined, and it removed me from the day-to-day oversight of the pro­grams I had initiated. I maintained contact using my other hat, however, work­ing for Will Foster. Evans was promoted to lieutenant colonel that summer, and soon he left NASA and the army to return to Iowa and manage his family’s large farm. With his departure, the Advanced Manned Missions Lunar and Planetary Offices were combined under Frank Dixon, who until then had been director of the Manned Planetary Missions Office.

In June 1965 I was transferred back to Manned Lunar Missions Studies, once again a separate office, under a new director, Philip Culbertson, brought in from General Dynamics to replace Evans. I mention these office moves only to illustrate the uncertainty that was present at NASA as top management tried to position the agency for life after Apollo. Although Manned Space Flight’s bud­gets were still growing, management could foresee that if new missions were not assigned soon, the agency would be largely marking time until the end of Apollo. The mantra in OMSF was that only large, manned-mission programs could sustain NASA. Other programs, such as unmanned space science and aeronautics research, though important, would never maintain a prominent agency in the federal government’s hierarchy, which consists of large cabinet – level departments and also smaller independent agencies like NASA. In Wash­ington, big, growing government programs were good for those managing them, and declining budgets were bad for ambitious managers.

At the same time as we were attempting to define the science content of the ALSS-AES missions, the Boeing Company’s lunar base study, with the title Lunar Exploration Systems for Apollo (LESA), was under way. When William Henderson joined our office at the end of 1963 he became the headquarters lunar base expert and assumed oversight of all the lunar base studies. Boeing’s final LESA report described a modular lunar base that would be assembled from Apollo hardware, incorporating greater modifications than required for ALSS-AES missions. By grouping modules, a base could support colonies of two to eighteen men. (We had no women astronauts at that time, so the studies were always described in masculine terms.) Individual modules might take as much as 25,000 pounds of useful payload to the lunar surface. Depending on the mix of equipment and the number of modules, these colonies could operate for ninety days to two years. We envisioned sending to the Moon large pieces of scientific equipment that would permit a wide range of activities. Long – duration geological and geophysical traverses in large wheeled vehicles could be conducted, as well as studies confined to the base, such as deep drilling and astronomical observations. These endeavors, we believed, would lay the groundwork to justify permanent bases.

During this period we persuaded our management to let us take several trips overseas to gain greater insight into some of the situations we expected to encounter during lunar exploration. In January 1964 Bill Henderson took the first of such trips, receiving permission to visit our scientific bases in Antarctica. He made the case that these stations were the closest examples we could find to what a base on the Moon would be like: isolated, difficult to supply, and therefore self-sufficient. Their primary reason for existence was to conduct scientific investigations; the secondary objective was to show the flag—or per­haps vice versa. Both these reasons closely followed what we believed would be the ultimate rationale for establishing lunar bases, and one couldn’t deny that Antarctic conditions were moonlike. Bill thought his time in Antarctica was well spent and, since he was the only person at headquarters with this ex­perience, his recommendations carried more weight when he advanced his thoughts on how to design a lunar base.

At the end of the rather massive Boeing study, Bill initiated a new round of more detailed lunar base analyses. The resulting contract, signed by the Lock­heed Missile and Space Company in February 1966 for $897,000, was the largest award ever made by our office. The study, called Mission Modes and Systems Analysis, would be supported by three other contractor studies valued at an additional $900,000. One of these studies, Scientific Mission Support Study for Extended Lunar Exploration, was won by North American Aviation, with Jack Green, of the ‘‘volcanic Moon,’’ playing a prominent role in the study. The contract would be monitored by Paul Lowman and Herman Gierow, Jim Downey’s deputy and a versatile manager who had participated in the earlier LESA studies.

For decades space dreamers and enthusiasts, including MSFC’s director, von Braun, had written and lectured on the possibility of establishing a lunar base. Now major government funds were to be spent on a serious look at what it would take to carry it off. The inherent ability of the Apollo hardware to place large payloads into Earth orbit and send them on to the Moon was the initial requirement for lunar base planners. After modifications, with each flight the Apollo upper stages would be capable of placing large payloads on the lunar surface. Big payloads meant you could envision supporting and supplying a large lunar colony over long periods at a reasonable cost. This was the challenge, first to Boeing, then to Lockheed and its support contractors: Tell us how it could be done, what such a base would look like, and how a base could support scientific and engineering operations that would justify its existence. The results of all these studies were encouraging, especially assuming that the nation would continue to commit large amounts of money to the investment it was making in Apollo—not an unreasonable expectation in the mid-1960s. Extended lunar exploration, followed by the establishment of one or more lunar bases, would not be cheap. But the initial analyses seemed to show that, for an additional investment approaching what would be spent on Apollo, all this could be done.

Bob Seamans, George Mueller, and E. Z. Gray began to lobby Congress for a NASA mandate that would implement these grand designs. When they testi­fied before NASA congressional oversight committees, they would impress the members with realistic artists’ renditions of what these stations and bases could look like. They also had funding estimates (supplied from our contractor stud­ies) to support their contention that continued lunar operations were feasible at a reasonable price and would produce important results. At a lower level in the management chain, staff like me, Paul Lowman, Bill Henderson, and others involved in the studies at MSFC took every opportunity to advertise our plans at professional conferences and public forums. We could usually count on good coverage from the media, and it seemed at the time that we were winning public support. Public polls always gave NASA high marks, and the major news and trade magazines were eager to write stories and show drawings of future lunar colonies.

Contractors who won our awards usually included well-known scientists on their teams as consultants (a few with Nobel credentials); they were to review study results during the contract and make recommendations to the contrac­tors to ensure that the results were grounded in scientific reality. During pro­posal evaluations, the quality of these consultants could determine which con­tractor would receive the award. While the contract was under way, or at its conclusion, we were not bashful about dropping their names if our assump­tions were challenged.

Returning to the ALSS-AES studies, in May 1964 MSFC put together the RFP for what we called the Emplaced Scientific Station (ESS). This study would provide a preliminary design of a self-sufficient geophysical station to be de­ployed by the astronauts on the lunar surface, incorporating several experi­ments listed in the Sonett Report and some from other sources. We received eight responses to the RFP and selected two contractors, Bendix Corporation, led by Lyle Tiffany, and Westinghouse, led by Jack Wild. These two contracts, along with the Scientific Mission Support Study, would provide us with enough detail that one year later we could extrapolate the results to design the Apollo geophysical station, which would have to meet more stringent requirements.

As we did for the ESS, we awarded two contracts in 1965 to study competing designs for a hundred-foot drill. One went to Westinghouse Electric Corpora­tion and a second to Northrup Space Laboratories. Each contract had a value of more than $500,000. The MSFC contract manager was John Bensko, a geologist who had worked in the oil and coal mining industries before joining NASA. After coming to MSFC, he helped develop engineering models of the lunar surface, useful background for his drill contracts. John put together an advisory team from the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Mines to provide addi­tional engineering expertise as the contractors began to cope with their difficult assignments. In those days NASA always attempted to at least match the con­tractors’ expertise in house so that our oversight and evaluation of their perfor­mance were well grounded. I believe this respect for each other’s abilities let NASA and its contractors work together better as a team, although some con­tractors grumbled at the tight monitoring. Today NASA’s approach to contract monitoring seems to have changed almost 180 degrees; in-house expertise in the aspects of a contract is often minimal. For the drill studies, NASA’s compe­tence was especially important, since we planned a series of difficult tests in­cluding drilling in a vacuum chamber at MSFC, never before attempted with a drill of this size.

Considering the unusual location for a drill rig and other constraints, the Westinghouse approach to drilling on the Moon was relatively straightforward, modeled after terrestrial wire-line drilling. Short sections of drill pipe were added from a rotating dispenser as drilling progressed; the core would be extracted from a short core stem after each section was taken from the drill hole. Since this would be close to a conventional design, it would entail almost constant monitoring by the astronauts. The Northrup design was radically different. It proposed using a flexible drill string, wound on a drum, that would be slowly fed into the hole to the final target depth of one hundred feet. A core stem would be attached to the end of a flexible pipe, and the core would be recovered much as in the Westinghouse design but without adding drill pipe sections every five to ten feet. Several innovative concepts were aimed at reduc­ing the astronauts’ involvement, and though we recognized that they posed some design risks, we accepted them as the price for a possible breakthrough in technology.

One of the major challenges for both concepts was cooling the bit during drilling to reduce wear. Bensko hired Arthur D. Little to do a separate analysis of how to accomplish the cooling. The company’s study showed that the cool­ing problem could be greatly mitigated in the vacuum environment of the Moon if the rock cuttings could be rapidly moved away from the bit face so that the they would carry off some of the heat. Spiral flutes were thus incorporated on the outside of the drill string, like an auger, to lift the cuttings up through the hole to the surface.

Although the spiral flutes partially solved how to cool the bit, as our studies progressed we found that after a short time the bit would still get too hot, become dull, and stop cutting. Both contractors settled on using diamond-core bits to ensure that they could drill through any rock type encountered. Westing – house had included Longyear on its team, and Northrup had teamed with Christianson Diamond Bits, the leading industrial suppliers of diamond-core bits. Both bit contractors concluded that, with the technology then available, even a diamond-core bit would need to be replaced many times in drilling a hundred-foot hole. This was unacceptable.

Initially, the best the Westinghouse team could do under test conditions was to drill fourteen inches through basalt, a possible lunar rock type, before an uncooled bit failed. But they reexamined the problem and finally hit on a solution. The diamond-core bits then offered to industry used a matrix that ‘‘glued’’ tiny diamonds to the bit in a random alignment. The random align­ment did not allow each diamond to present its best cutting edge to the rock being cored, however. They demonstrated that carefully setting the diamonds in the matrix significantly prolonged the life of the bit. Hand setting each diamond would add greatly to the bit’s cost, but it would be well worth it for a lunar mission where the astronauts’ time was more precious than a diamond bit. These newly designed bits lasted more than ten feet before they dulled. After other design changes, eventually we expected to drill the entire one hundred feet with just one bit, eliminating a time-consuming chore. As I recall, Chris­tianson developed a relatively inexpensive technique to manufacture bits of this design for their terrestrial customers. Although they cost more than normal diamond-core bits, they were worth the investment because fewer were needed.

The cost of drilling on Earth is strongly influenced not only by the price of bits but by the time needed to extract a dulled bit from the drill hole, change bits, and resume drilling.

As the studies continued, progress on the Northrup design slowed, and the contract was terminated before they delivered a complete working model. Our gamble had failed. A Westinghouse model was tested at MSFC, including vac­uum chamber tests. Finally tests were held in the desert in Arizona and New Mexico to simulate drilling under lunar conditions (but not in a vacuum), with no lubrication for the bit. Bensko recalls that we chose a bad time for our tests: there had been more rainfall than normal, and the wet soil gummed up the flutes. In other tests the fluted drill pipe performed about as expected, and we were encouraged to believe that a full-scale drill could extract cores on the Moon to depths of one hundred feet.

In anticipation of drilling a deep hole on the Moon, in 1965 we started two studies with Texaco and Schlumberger to design logging devices that would determine conditions beneath the lunar surface. (Taking measurements in ter­restrial drill holes is standard practice for obtaining information on subsurface conditions.) These contracts, also worth more than $500,000 each, were man­aged by MSFC’s Orlo Hudson.

In both terrestrial drilling and drill-hole logging, the drill hole is almost always filled with a fluid, of varying chemistry, the remnants of the drilling mud. Lacking this liquid to couple the logging tools to the subsurface rock formations, the contractors were forced to modify standard oil field technology. The Texaco team, which had extensive experience in developing logging devices for oil field exploration, had won an award from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide logging devices for the Ranger and Surveyor projects. In their planning stages both projects included small drills as potential science pay­loads. Schlumberger, the acknowledged leader in developing logging devices for the oil and mineral exploration industry, showed an interest in such unworldly studies (to our surprise), entered a bid, and won the other contract. Both contractors overcame the lunar logging constraints and designed a suite of devices that could make measurements in a hole drilled on the Moon. Perhaps one day, when the opportunity arises to drill deep holes on the Moon or some other extraterrestrial body, these studies will be found and reread.

The most interesting set of studies we conducted were those related to providing mobility once the astronauts reached the lunar surface. Many con­cepts were being proposed, some more fanciful than others. MSFC had re­ported the results of the first in-house mobility studies in volume 9 of the Lunar Logistic System series.6 Two of the main contributors to these studies were Jean Olivier and David Cramblit, who wrote several reports on lunar surface mobility. To learn what types of mobility systems would work best on the Moon, based on the limited knowledge available, MSFC and the Kennedy Space Center developed a lunar surface model to study how wheeled vehicles might perform on soils in a lunar vacuum and what type of obstacles they would have to traverse.7

JPL had also developed a lunar surface model in order to design a small unmanned vehicle for the Surveyor project.8 It had tested several designs on simulated lunar terrain in the early 1960s. My first trip to JPL was to witness a test of a small vehicle operated by an engineer with a handheld remote-control box, hardwired to the rover. It was much like a modern toy car except for the connecting wire. Today’s electronics permit cheap radio-controlled toys; in the early 1960s radio control was a luxury we usually did without when testing our concepts. This was an interesting demonstration of a small articulated vehicle with springy wheels driving over loose sandy material and small rocks. From time to time there were short interruptions caused by failures in the then state – of-the-art electrical circuits, powered by vacuum tubes. One could say that the granddaughter of this vehicle was the small rover named Sojourner that tra­versed the Martian surface in July 1997. A United States automated rover never made it to the Moon, but a Soviet rover named Lunokhod operated on the Moon in 1970.

Although in 1964 and 1965 we still did not have any data from direct contact with the lunar surface, information from radar and laboratory studies pre­dicted how the Moon’s surface layer would respond to a wheeled vehicle. In spite of Tommy Gold’s theories, we were certain that a vehicle could move around without serious difficulties. But we were not sure how the Moon’s almost total vacuum would affect the lunar soil; the high vacuum that would be encountered on the Moon was impossible to achieve on Earth. Studies had been conducted in high vacuum using several types of simulated lunar soil, but their fidelity was open to question because our ideas about the composition of lunar soil (grain size, mineralogy, and other characteristics) were mostly guesses.

Our first contractor studies of a lunar surface vehicle were undertaken by the Bendix Corporation and the Boeing Aerospace Division. They were selected in

May 1964 to study ALSS exploration payloads, including a vehicle we had dubbed MOLAB (for mobile laboratory). The Boeing study was managed by Grady Mitchum, and the Bendix manager was Charles Weatherred. Because of their involvement in the post-Apollo studies, both these men and their com­panies would be important contributors to later Apollo contracts. Bendix had earlier won one of the JPL design contracts for a small Surveyor rover, so it was well prepared to undertake the study. From taking part in our lunar base studies, Boeing had a good background that included designing mobility concepts.

The concept for using a MOLAB was to have it delivered to the Moon by an ALSS automated LEM. It would then be deployed and operated remotely so that it could travel to another LEM carrying two astronauts that would land a short distance away. It was to be a vehicle of about seven thousand pounds, including the scientific equipment it would carry. It would support two astro­nauts for up to two weeks in a pressurized cab, permitting shirt-sleeve working conditions while under way. Based on our study of early geologic maps of the Moon, we felt that such a vehicle should have a traverse range of several hun­dred miles so the astronauts could make several trips far enough from their landing site to sample geologically interesting areas. These requirements were a tall order for any vehicle, not to mention one that must function on the lunar surface.

The two contractors were also asked to design a shelter that could be deliv­ered by the same type of automated LEM and a smaller, unpressurized vehicle we named the local scientific survey module (LSSM). (Moon vehicles had to have strange names; they couldn’t just be called cars or trucks, since they would be so different from any of their terrestrial cousins.) All these studies were to be accomplished by both contractors for a total of slightly more than $1.5 million.

As the studies progressed, under the direction of Joe de Fries and Lynn Bradford at MSFC, the MSFC Manufacturing Engineering Lab built a full-scale mock-up to evaluate such things as cabin size and crew station layout. Many photographs of this rather unusual looking vehicle were circulated to the media and other interested groups, showing our progress toward the next step in lunar exploration. A December 1964 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology featured a front cover picture showing the mock-up sitting on top of a LEM truck and included a special report on the Bendix version.9 The MOLAB, more than any other project we worked on for post-Apollo missions, seemed to catch the imagination of futurists, perhaps reflecting the national love affair with the automobile. Perhaps people could visualize themselves speeding across the lunar surface, dodging boulders and craters.

At the conclusion of the initial contracts in July 1965, both contractors were given extensions totaling more than $1 million to refine their LSSM designs. Bendix and General Motors received two other contracts to produce four-wheel and six-wheel LSSM test designs, each worth almost $400,000. By the end of 1965 we had awarded lunar vehicle contracts for more than $3.5 million and had probably spent almost as much for in-house civil service workers and contractor support.

While all this wheeled-vehicle planning was under way, Textron Bell Aero­space Company was quietly developing a small manned lunar flying vehicle (LFV). A one-man version was demonstrated in a live test early in 1964. (A later generation of this device was demonstrated at large gatherings including the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and a version was flown in the James Bond movie Thunderball.) Bell had conducted a preliminary study of how to com­bine the MOLAB and the LFV, sponsored by NASA’s Office of Advanced Re­search and Technology. In these early days we had a good working relationship with OART; under the direction of James Gangler, it was attempting to look far ahead at technology needs for lunar exploration and lunar bases. After the impressive one-man flight demonstration, MSFC awarded Textron Bell a follow-on contract in August 1964 to further define the concept. In these stud­ies the LFV was given two functions—to return the astronauts to a base camp in case of a MOLAB breakdown and to help them reach difficult sites.

The MSFC contract with Textron Bell called for an LFV design that would carry two astronauts a minimum of fifty miles for the safety fly-back mission. This would also be a useful range to take the astronauts to sites they could not reach overland. MSFC later awarded Bell a second contract with a more modest goal—to support AES missions requiring an operations radius of only fifteen miles. This vehicle, which needed far less fuel because of its shorter range, could carry one astronaut and three hundred pounds of equipment or transport two astronauts the same distance. Both design studies and a working prototype indicated that an LFV with these characteristics was feasible.

A study was also done to assess the advantages of using the lunar surface for astronomical observations, an application supported by some, but not all, in the astronomical fraternity. In 1965 MSFC awarded Kollsman Instrument Cor­poration a one-year contract for $144,000 to assess the feasibility of carrying a large optical telescope observatory to the Moon mounted on a modified auto­mated LEM lander. MSFC’s contract monitor was Ernest Wells, an amateur astronomer whose avocation served him well in this job. Kollsman was already developing the Goddard Experimental Package (GEP), an automated observa­tory scheduled to be launched in 1966 on the Orbiting Astronomical Observa­tory (OAO), so working with the company would save effort and money.

The GEP consisted of a thirty-six-inch reflector telescope, its mounting, a camera, and associated electronics. Improvements to the GEP design to take advantage of its lunar location could be recommended during this study, as well as design changes to accommodate the astronauts’ involvement in its operation, since the OAO design was a fully automated observatory. The results were encouraging, indicating that the astronomical payload could operate on the Moon for long periods in both an unmanned and a manned mode.10 Kollsman also reported that new technology, by greatly reducing the overall weight, might permit a much larger instrument, perhaps up to 120 inches in diameter, to be carried on the same LEM truck.

A fallout of these studies at MSFC was the establishment of a Scientific Payloads Division in Stuhlinger’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Jim Downey be­came the director of this new division, and Herman Gierow was named deputy. Later, as the MSFC work on post-Apollo science wound down, both Jim and Herman went on to manage important new programs that included work on the Apollo telescope mount flown on Skylab. Their work on space-based astronomy culminated in the launch of three high energy astronomical obser­vatories in the 1970s and studies of a large space telescope that evolved a few years later into the successful Hubbell space telescope program.

The transition from planning ALSS missions to planning AES missions was relatively painless. AES payloads would be smaller than those we anticipated for ALSS missions but much larger than Apollo’s allocation. By this time we had a much better understanding of the Apollo hardware than when we started our ALSS studies, and we were also becoming aware of the potential Apollo opera­tional margins that could permit larger payloads or increase flexibility. We hoped these margins would soon be available as confidence in Apollo’s perfor­mance grew.

Removing the ascent propulsion and other unnecessary systems required during a normal LEM ascent and rendezvous would free up space for approxi­mately 6,000 pounds of payload, 1,000 pounds less than the total used for the

ALSS studies. Of the 6,000 pounds, 3,500 would be required for consumables and other additions so two men could stay in the LEM for two weeks. The remaining 2,500 pounds could then be used for scientific equipment. This represented a rather firm increase of an order of magnitude over the expected allocation for Apollo science payloads. Although 2,500 pounds was less than half the weight we had been using in planning, it was enough to be exciting.

Based on 2,500 pounds and results coming in from our ALSS-AES studies and USGS work at Flagstaff, we divided a typical payload as follows: 1,000 pounds for a fully charged LSSM with a range of 125 miles, 200 pounds for a hundred-foot core drill, 90 pounds for logging devices, 350-400 pounds for an ESS, 80 pounds for a small preliminary sample analysis lab, 100 pounds for geological field mapping equipment, 150 pounds for geophysical field survey equipment, 30 pounds for sample return containers, and up to 500 pounds for a power supply for the drill or other exploration equipment. We felt this equip­ment would let the astronauts take full advantage of a two-week stay and study their landing site in some detail. For safety reasons, during manned operations the LSSM would be restricted to a radius of five miles, but it could operate in both manned and automated modes. After the astronauts left it could carry out investigations farther from the landing site, to the limit of its battery charge, under command from Earth.

Our planning for lunar exploration after the initial Apollo landings was now in high gear. The next step was to test our ideas as realistically as possible so we could not be accused of offering proposals thought up by ‘‘some high – school student.’’