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

400 Project Apollo: Americans to the Moon
What NASA needed were highly qualified individuals to lead the overall
Apollo program at its Washington Headquarters. After considering several other
candidates from both inside and outside of the Agency, Webb, Dryden, and
Seamans settled on D. Brainerd Holmes, who had managed the very large ballistic
missile early warning project for RCA. Webb used his powers of persuasion to
convince Holmes to join NASA. Holmes accepted the position and joined NASA
in October 1961 in the new position of Associate Administrator for Manned
Space Flight. One of Holmes’s first identified needs was to find someone to apply
a “systems management” approach to the already sprawling Project Apollo; that
person turned out to be a dynamic young engineer named Joseph Shea, who
came to NASA at the very end of 1961. 16 Over the following year, Holmes and
Shea provided the energy and technical management skills to get Apollo started
down a path to a lunar landing “before this decade is out,” although neither was
with NASA by the time that first landing took place.
On the same day, 20 November, that Rosen recommended development
of a five-engine first stage Saturn vehicle, White House science advisor Jerome
Wiesner prepared a memorandum for the President’s close associate Theodore
Sorenson, summarizing the state of progress on Project Apollo. Wiesner noted,
“Six months have elapsed since the decision was announced to put man on the
moon, yet none of these crucial hardware programs have progressed beyond the
study phase. Lead times on these development and construction programs are
of critical importance.” In particular, “Major decisions have not been announced
as to what extent rendezvous will be employed, what Advanced Saturn vehicle
will be built (probably C-4), and what will be the characteristics of the so-called
Nova which could put man on the moon by direct ascent. The relative emphasis
of rendezvous versus direct ascent is a key to the entire program.” (II-19) It would
take almost a year before a decision on how to go to the Moon—by some form of
rendezvous or by a direct flight—was final; that decision, as Wiesner noted, was
key to getting to the Moon before 1970.
Finding a Way to the Moon 17
NASA Chooses The Way
In early May 1961, when it appeared likely that President Kennedy would
approve sending Americans to the Moon, NASA Associate Administrator Robert
Seamans asked one of his senior staff members, William Fleming, to put together
16. Murray and Cox, Apollo, pp. 120–123; Robert C. Seamans, Jr., Aiming at Targets (Washington,
DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Special Publication-4106, 1996), pp. 93–94.
For a discussion of the application of systems management to Apollo, see Stephen B. Johnson,
The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002).
17. For more detailed discussions of the decision on what should be the preferred approach to
a lunar landing, see John M. Logsdon, “NASA’s Implementation of the Lunar Landing Decision,”
NASA HHN-81, September 1968; James R. Hansen, Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the