Rendezvous The Way Home from the Moon

I am working on a story about how we painted our office/guest room. It's not interesting enough to share yet. There was hardly any fighting over how to do it or what color to use. But let me inject here that "I said I was sorry" to cover any hurt feelings. I don't know who invented the idea to paint the room orange. If it was Mark, it was brilliant; if it was me, it was self-serving. But we agree now that it is done how smashing the color choice is, and it gives one a burst of creativity when sitting in the room we call the office. Indeed, my husband gets all the credit for the success of painting the office. I can only say I like orange, and I sanded the rough spots. Having just read about the man who figured out the way to the moon saving the space program from failure, he did not get recognition for his brilliant work. So, I want to give Mark credit for all our fancy paint finishes.

What am I reading this week?

The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon | Todd Zwillich

At the start of the 1960s, President Kennedy gave a speech challenging the nation to fly to the moon within a decade. He was in a bit of a slump politically. There was a failed invasion of Cuba just before, and the address gave him a massive boost in popularity - 70% approval after the speech.

I do not believe Kennedy was honest in his challenge. I think it was a stunt. I believe this because he had not clued anyone in the science community or NASA that this challenge was coming. Also, since then, presidents have made bold space proclamations along the same lines that sound good as a stunt to boost their popularity without any follow-through. In the case of Kennedy, the moon shot program took on a life of its own. The country did follow through, thanks to the work of one man. I want to note that I read the audiobook, which uses some of the audio interviews with his family and other scientists who knew the story. The first-hand accounts are humanizing. Maybe the book shouldn't cover much about the engineering of the man who knew the way to the moon. I like the narrative that he was just a dude who knew better and was not afraid of losing his job to say so.

No one expected the demands the president laid out.

Back to the story of the book. In 1961, none of the systems to make the moonshot happen were invented. We barely managed to send a man up in an arch to splash down, not even an orbit. The president challenged the nation to his epic project with no thought to what it would take and dropped it in the laps of the existing rocket program community. Unfortunately, the current theory of how to get to the moon was comic book stuff. A brute-force straight shot. It had the fewest hitches and sounded simple enough. Fly directly to the moon on a giant rocket, land it on the moon tail first, and fly it back to Earth.

However, it was not that simple. That single ship both ways technology does not even exist today. More fundamentally, the space program in the early 1960s was thinking much more modestly. They had no solid plans to fly to the moon. They planned to build a space station to allow spacemen to work out the kinks of space flight close to home before jumping off for the moon. Pretty quickly after the Kennedy speech, NASA engineers realized the direct flight systems would require engines and rockets many times larger than could have been developed in the time allowed. After all, the president said before the end of the decade.

The hero of the story was John C. Houbolt. The book does not discuss how he figured out the details, but rather how he stuck his neck out to push the idea to his bosses and how he did not get the recognition then. He worked out the solution to the problem of getting to the moon with attainable technology. He developed the math equations that allowed NASA to meet President Kennedy's challenge to land on the moon within ten years. Rather than take one giant ship both ways. John worked out the concept of going with two ships One to go and get back and one for landing on the moon. He laid out the idea of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR). The math seemed too complex for his peers, and they turned him away. Later, those same engineers embraced his plan and made it the policy to develop LOR as the solution that got boots on the moon with half the effort/energy/fuel of a single rocket concept.

Bonus, Apollo 13 was damaged on the way to the moon; all would have been lost with a single ship design. Having the smaller landing ship as a rescue boat saved the crew's lives.

Big takeaway. The rocket to lift the astronauts off the moon had never been tested. That is some severe corner-cutting to make a deadline.

Lost opportunities.

Had the space program developed more slowly, as envisioned before Kennedy with the space station and smaller ships, as opposed to the rushed Apollo program, we might have had a more robust space program with more stamina to weather budget constraints.