NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with John Cornelius Houbolt, aerospace engineer behind the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), part 2 of 4

often use the notion. It's easier than driving a car into the garage. Okay, good. We've got to change the phone. Great, it's a real good. Let me make a few comments about the weight issue, and that goes back to what we call rocket fundamentals. It depends on how many kinds of thrusting maneuvers the vehicle that you have in mind will be making. If you just want to go in north of orbit, it requires a rocket of a

certain size. Now if you want to go in the earth orbit and then escape from the earth's gravity, it takes a rocket of a still bigger size. Then if you get near the moon and have to break into orbit, it takes some more rocket power which back translates to the earth of an even bigger rocket. Then if you have to blast out of the moon's environment to return to earth, it has a back effect and makes the rocket on the earth even larger yet. It has a compound in effect when every time you have to use an additional thrusting maneuver. And that's a very serious thing about rocket design. Now LOR didn't have all those different difficulties, and it could be done at half the weight of what the direct flight would move. Let me show, I don't know whether I showed this slide before. Let me show this. Let me talk about the weight issue again.

And let me describe it in terms of the three different modes that were finally under consideration. This is the so-called NOVA vehicle that was associated with the direct flight mode for going to the moon. You can see the size of it. It's just because trying to do everything with one rocket would just automatically means a rocket of immense weight in that case around 15 million pounds. Now when the earth orbit rather than the moon mode was considered, I actually the weight is even greater because you had to have two vehicles. One was you called a tanker and another one that was empty. You'd send up the tanker, then you'd send this vehicle up and transfer fuel from this rocket to this so that you could then finish the trip to the moon. But again, the sum of those two is about 15 million pounds, each one weighs seven and a half million pounds. Now by dispensing with all these very expensive thrusting maneuvers,

LOR offered a simplification and you found that you could do it with only one rocket. When I've mentioned the business about weight savings to begin with, my figure's indicated a factor of saving of one third to one half and people thought that was sort of nonsense and didn't believe my figures, but I'd like to point out in this. This rocket weighs seven and a half pounds. The direct flight was 15. Isn't seven and a half one half of 15 pounds? If you did it by the earth orbit run, you'd had two vehicles and one here isn't one one half of two, so there was a weight saving that ultimately realized of a factor two. When did you know you'd won the argument? Did you go to the meeting at Huntsville? Oh, I went to all meetings and one meeting at Huntsville in particular when I showed the whole idea to Von Braun. He just said there's his John. That's no good. That was his reaction. We had numerous committee meetings on

rendezvous, direct flight modes, and had great difficulty in all those meetings, convinced them that LOR had merit and should be given due consideration. There was another point of some of the things that I did. I felt if I could get the people to study it, they too would be convinced, but they were so negative about it, they wouldn't even listen or study the idea. So that was some of the problems that I had in getting the points across. Were you frustrated? At times, I was frustrated, but somehow I kept going. What about the White House? Didn't you have to convince the White House even? What was the objection coming out of the White House? Oh, the White House came from the scientific advisor to the president. He went down and visited Von Braun's center and he pointed, and by that time Von Braun had been convinced and capitulated and was in favor of Lunar Baranavu. Matter of fact, he became my greatest ally. Weasener, the scientific advisor,

told Von Braun in front of Kennedy that this LOR was no good at all, and so they got into a little argument about it. Then President Kennedy intervened and says, Von Braun, it's in your hand, you take care of it. When did you know that you had won? How did you hear about it and what did it mean? Oddly enough, you know, things like this had bothered me. As late as September 1961, and this was, no, the fight has been going on for two and a half years, Guild Rose wrote a memorandum in which he said, I'm against Lunar Baranavu in every form, and so this was very discouraging to me also. But then Von Braun, as I say, saw the merit to it, and that started the reversal in opinion, and finally everybody joined in Unison, that LOR was the way to go and favorite way to go. Now, I was in Paris at the time, given a paper before the so-called Von Carmen Institute,

and they had an article in the New York Herald Tribune about the fact that NASA had adopted LOR. I hadn't seen it, but a colleague of mine, Mr. Garrick, saw it, and he came up to me and he shook my hands, and he said, congratulations, John. They've adopted your LOR method. I can safely say, I'm shaking hands with a man who single-handedly has saved the government $25 billion. I thought that was a pretty nice little compliment. Did it really? Yes, and it did save that much. All there was some arguments after we all had only saved $10 billion, $15 million, but I think the real truth is that it saved at least from $20 to $25 billion. Okay, terrific. Talk to me about Gemini. Why was Gemini important? Was Gemini a stepping stone to the moon? To answer your question, was Gemini a stepping stone to the moon? Yes, indeed it was.

Gemini had the objectives of proving rendezvous was indeed feasible and was also studying longer duration of men in spaceflight. That was the two important goals there. Now, Gemini came about, and my feeling is, again, on an admiral's page that I wrote before, is we advocated the small group of people that were involved with rendezvous. We advocated a rendezvous experiment involving a mercury capsule, which we already had, and then another small target capsule. And we were saying, this is a good way to show that rendezvous is easy and convenient and feasible to do is to have this project. I presented this to a lot of the space desk group people, and on one of the meetings about it, the next day Gemini was born. And so the idea of using the mercury with the target vehicle, all of a sudden got transformed to Gemini project, a little bigger rocket

that was involved. Is it true that Gemini had not even been part of the original plan? And Gemini was not a part of the original plan. That came in after, well, we'll have to say it this way, every notion like that had a sequence. Mercury itself was given a lot of problems. We had to develop that before we could go to the next step. But the next step then finally became rendezvous, and then the third step came going to the moon. There's something that I'd like to point out on this chart also. And the conclusions are given over here, which I won't read at the moment. But the key thing is this figure right here. And that was, and this is how I think the notion that Von Braun adopted ER was stimulated by this thought. Here we proposed going to the moon, but it involved both Earth orbit rendezvous and lunar orbit rendezvous. And the main reason for that is the boosters that we had on the drawing bird weren't

large enough to do it by lunar orbit rendezvous itself. But we said, make the boosters larger, and you can dispense with Earth orbit rendezvous and use lunar orbit rendezvous only. That was a very key thing. And that was a result that Saturn V came into being. Okay, let's just stop for a second. Okay, what kind of ideas had been on the drawing board or is it John? And where was Ella Warren on the list? When we've had our first meeting on rendezvous to try to select a proper mode to go to the moon, there were about five contenders. There was the Earth orbit rendezvous, lunar orbit rendezvous. There was one notion I think was advocated by JPL of just sending a bunch of packages to the moon and land them, and go up there, and I use the terminology myself, use a caterpillar tractor to go collect them and put them back so that you could then return to Earth. I didn't think very much of that idea.

Then there was a couple other items that used boosters of a different size, and I can't really relate the details of each one of those two. But at the end of our committee meeting, they voted on the sequence of which one is the preferred one. Out of the rendezvous modes, the first one, of course, which is what I knew would happen. They chose Earth orbit rendezvous first, but we put LOR down the bottom of the list. All right, near the bottom of the list. And of course, that didn't please me very much. Could we have made it to the moon and back without the use of LOR? I believe and firmly believe that LOR is the only way that we could have done a job. Any other method that would have been conceived the direct flight Earth orbit would have taken longer, probably have failed in the course of doing it. We have to consider this factor also to show the simplicity of the way the mission was done by use of LOR. When we first made the decision to

go to the moon using LOR, it was 1962. We knew essentially zero about spaceflight. We had no experience on it. We didn't know about space suit, environment, communications, inertial navigation, everything. But a very interesting point is that this will never happen again in history. What made it possible? The goal had been set by President. The money was made available. Congress was behind it. The nation itself was mobilized to do the job. And we'll never have all those things in a unison again in history as far as I can see. And we did the job in seven years from the 1962 to 1969, which is a really remarkable accomplishment. It's fantastic, especially in view when you think in terms of the development of a new modern airplane. In spite of 50 years of

data, 50 years of experience, it still takes seven to eight years to develop a new airplane model. We went to the whole moon and back with zero knowledge in seven years, which is a fantastic accomplishment. It's one of the genuine technology breakthroughs of all time in my mind. Perfect. Who's credited with the actual idea of lunar orbit, rendezvous? There was, I mean, there was, I think, a little misinterpretation about credited, but I think the little group of men we had down here at Langley Research Center is the ones that are generally credited as making it all possible. And I believe because my in direct involvement, perseverance over the three years, I've been given quite a bit of credit for it also. Once again, just for Brent's sake, I want a simple statement of how long and hard

you fought to make this thing happen. The question about the amount of time that there was this discussion and debate over whether we should use LOR or any other method is an interesting one. Because actually it took about three years. We started on this and I know my pitches on it started in 1959 and the decision wasn't made until 1962. So there was at least a three year of constant struggle and debate about what mode we should use until it was finally adopted. And LOR, fortunately, was chosen. And what about the scope of the argument? I got really personal. I mean, people call it yet. Did it get pretty personal? Did it get in that way? Well, was there some personal animosity towards me if I word it correctly that way? Yes. At a meeting here in headquarters, Washington headquarters,

before the administrative and social administrator von Braun, I got up and gave a little 15 minute talk about how to go to the moon by using LOR. Max Fishing got up on the table and pounded and he says, don't you listen to him. His figure's lie. His figure's lie. And Bob Seaman, who was cheering the meeting, said, I think we ought to have a recess at the moment. But the argument still continued out in the hallway. Had to feel about that. To me, it was just another incident, another case of people expressing a negative point of view towards it. And because they really hadn't studied the benefits or merits of LOR, they didn't really appreciate its merits. And they probably didn't like it from the point of view of what invented here syndrome and things of this sort. Great, terrific. That's it. What about the prize? Well, I don't know. I heard about this. You got skipped over for that $100,000 prize.

What did you feel about that? I was pretty lifting up. What was it, first of all? I didn't know what we were talking about. The very interesting sequel to the Lenny and the Moon occurred. They have here at Washington headquarters what they call an invention and contribution board. They are empowered to give a certain amount of money, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 to an individual or individuals who made a significant contribution. And a meeting in the board one time, one person said, gee, that hobo has done something really remarkable here and nobody's nominated him for an award. Why don't we take it upon ourselves just to nominate him? And so they all agreed and they were in the mood that it would be a nice substantial award. They could go at their own discretion up to $100,000, but they were going to go by going a little further to go over $100,000. And then for some reason,

Gil Ruth, all of a sudden they said we better check with somebody first just to check ourselves. So they asked Gil Ruth to do about this possibility and his letter wasn't a very kind letter and it killed it completely. So there went my $100,000. How did you feel about that? Well, quite disappointed. That's the only thing I could have done at the time. And I was a little disappointed at Gil Ruth, who I thought was supposed to be a eminent scientist, would take the standard he did. What was the standard? That they would have done the job without me, and that my ways were frantic. And yet, if you talk to Owen Maynard, who was one of the persons that first used my equations in Codville, Johnson, their common is John was always laid back, very helpful every time. And he helped us to all these stormy things very nicely. So

his Gil Ruth's position on the other side of the fence just completely stumbled me. Do you feel now as your legacy, you know, you're an older guy now, and this is your, do you feel special about this contribution of LOR? I sure do. I sure do. I grew up in the farm. And to me, it's been a remarkable experience my life to have an experience growing up in the farm, working 16 hours a day, milking cows in the morning under 20 below zero and everything, to know that I've been involved with one of our greatest achievements of mankind. I feel rather special about that. And I could, well, there are a lot of things like this can come to mind, as we mentioned this. I, when he had the Apollo 11 lift off, I was invited to go the Cape Canaveral to watch it. From there, I went to the mission control room and we watched the whole

mission there. And at the time the landing was being made, Armstrong was having a little difficult time landing it. And we knew, but the public didn't know that the fuel was getting very low. We were saying, get it down, get it down. And then it was landed. And all of a sudden, the motions of everybody came through. They all got up and clapped. But at the same time, they all said, shh, because they didn't want to miss a fraction of second of history being made. And at the same time, Von Braun was sitting right in front of me, turned to me with an okay sign. Thank you, John. That's the biggest compliment I've had in my life. Okay, cut. Terrific. All right. Thank you, much.