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

398 Project Apollo: Americans to the Moon
Building the Spacecraft
Meantime, NASA had been thinking about an advanced spacecraft called
Apollo since at least 1960. Thus the organization was quickly able to initiate
the procurement of the vehicle, even before it was known exactly how it would
be used for the lunar landing mission. By 28 July 1961, NASA had an approved
procurement plan in place; 12 firms were identified as potential bidders. (II-13)
Ultimately, only five bids for the contract were submitted. The competition for
the Apollo spacecraft contract took place over the following four months; on 28
November, NASA announced that North American Aviation had been selected
to build the vehicle. This turned out to be a controversial decision, particularly
after problems with North America’s performance became known and it was
discovered that the NASA Source Evaluation Board had identified the Martin
Company as its preferred choice, with North American Aviation as a “desirable
alternative.” 14 (II-20)
Selecting the Launch Vehicle
While the basic elements of the Apollo spacecraft, with a three-person crew
and two elements, (one housing the crew and the command center for the vehicle
and the other housing propulsion and other systems) had been fixed since 1960,
it took NASA until the end of 1961 to select the launch vehicle for the Apollo
missions to the Moon. There were two reasons for this. One was that the “national
space plan” contained in the 8 May Webb-McNamara memorandum had called
for a collaborative NASA-Department of Defense effort to define a family of
launch vehicles that could meet both agencies’ requirements and advance the
development of both liquid fuel and solid-fuel propulsion systems. While NASA,
and particularly its rocket development team headed by Wernher von Braun,
had experience only with liquid-fueled boosters, the Department of Defense was
interested in pushing the development of large solid-fuel rocket motors for various
advanced military and intelligence uses. The focus of this planning effort was a
“NASA-DOD Large Launch Vehicle Planning Group.” The group was directed by
Nicholas Golovin of NASA; its deputy director was Lawrence Kavanaugh of DOD.
The group started work in July 1961, and by the fall had become bogged down in
very detailed studies and deadlocked over the relative roles of liquid-fueled and
solid-fueled boosters in the lunar landing program. Its final recommendations
attempted to satisfy both NASA and DOD, and ended up pleasing neither agency.
(Volume II, II-20)
In parallel with the Large Launch Vehicle study, NASA continued to carry
out its own analyses of what kind of launch vehicles would be needed for Project
Apollo. These analyses were hindered by a basic issue; NASA at the end of 1961
had not yet selected the approach—called the “mission mode”—which it would
14. For a history of the Apollo spacecraft, see Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, and
Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft (Washington, DC:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Special Publication-4205, 1979).