Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

Exploring the Unknown 273
Source: Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History
Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC.
Document I-55
Document Title: Eldon W. Hall, Director, Gemini Systems Engineering, NASA,
to Deputy Director, Gemini Program, NASA, “Circumlunar Missions,” 29
June 1965.
Source: Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History
Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC.
Document I-56
Document Title: James E. Webb, Administrator, NASA, to Olin E. Teague,
Chairman, Subcommittee on NASA Oversight, Committee on Science and
Astronautics, House of Representatives, 10 September 1965.
Source: Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History
Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC.
In the spring of 1964 it appeared to many senior officials at NASA that the Apollo program
was stalling and might not be able to make its deadline of a lunar landing by the end of
the decade. The last Mercury flight had taken place in May 1963, and Gemini was not
scheduled to fly for several months. The Saturn rocket project was having difficulties, and
the Apollo spacecraft development effort was lagging behind schedule. Accordingly, Wernher
von Braun suggested to a reporter for Missiles and Rockets that in a contingency he
thought Gemini might be reconfigurable for a flight around the Moon. This story, appearing
on 18 May 1964, quoted von Braun as saying that Gemini could undertake a circumlunar
flight “to salvage this country’s prestige if the manned lunar goal proves impossible.” Von
Braun had voiced something that had been bubbling within NASA for some time, and
thereafter pressure mounted to formalize and make public efforts to evaluate the possibility
of a Gemini circumlunar flight. Throughout the summer of 1964, as these documents
show, NASA undertook internal studies. They were only internal, for on 8 June, NASA
Deputy Associate Administrator Robert C. Seamans told NASA Associate Administrator for
Manned Spaceflight George Mueller that “any circumlunar mission studies relating to the
use of Gemini will be confined to in-house study efforts.” In reality, NASA leaders had bet
the future of their Agency on the success of Apollo. They intended to make Apollo succeed
and any serious effort to reconfigure Gemini as a “quick and dirty” lunar program would
detract from that objective. The studies were at best halfhearted. In his 10 September 1965
memorandum to Representative Olin Teague (D-Texas), NASA Administrator James E.
Webb said it well,: “Our main objective now is to see that our basic current responsibilities
are met effectively . . . the Apollo system now being developed can meet our requirements for
knowledge and capability better than the adoption of other courses of action.”