NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with John Cornelius Houbolt, aerospace engineer behind the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), part 3 of 4

Okay, we're rolling around the chin up, you reach for something over on the right here, John, make a hole in this folder on the right hand side of the table. Bring that up closer to your face even, John, that's it, look to the right hand corner of it, and drip it away, back down, okay, I'll end up on the right hand, yeah, good. What are you looking for there, John?

At one time because I felt this might be significant from my history point of view, I made out a chronology of the various meetings, peaches, talks, presentations that I'd made on the possible benefits of using LOR as a way of landing on the moon. How many, how long did it go, how many meetings did it have? I started here making notes way back in November 6, 1957, and I have at least about 50 entries here, and the last one sort of I put on this particular chronology was in 1963, that's a year after the decision of how to go to the moon was finally made. Can you show me the first entry, just point it right over here to the camera, show it, yeah. November 6, 1957, my analysis of orbital trajectories, which got me into the space aid.

And then the next entry, I'd already studied trajectories as well as the rendezvous maneuvers, the person that was my supervisor at the time, recommended that I give a possible paper on the use of rendezvous up at a SAE kind of meeting, society for automotive engineering in New York. And then continues with the various things, various minutes that I wrote at meetings that we held, or I even had gone out to ran corporation to practice on a little rendezvous simulator, the ran corporation gave me a license to rendezvous, that was in 1959. Why did it take so long? You know, these were intelligent people. First of all, what did the skeptics say, used to say to you about why it wouldn't work? They gave a simple little explanation.

rendezvous, we don't have any part about it. It's an unproven thing, we don't know anything about it's safety, and we have no notion that it even works. And so, they more or less just had closed ears to any thought about using rendezvous in space efforts. Didn't they give you some kind of a percentage of what, you know, getting men there and getting them back? Yes. As a matter of fact, as a person in headquarters, I wrote, Hobart has a scheme that has a 10% chance of getting a man to the moon and a 0% chance of brain returning them safely to earth. The attitude and general feeling at the time, it just inspired me to go after it all the more and to try to convince them otherwise that, indeed, LOR was the only way that we could have gotten to the moon and that effect that it was simple, had a lot of reliability and redundancy and abort effects, which other missions did not have.

Now, be honest, John, I'm sitting here in your study and surrounded by all this memorabilia and, you know, you did have ultimate success, but weren't there times when you said, this is just too much, I got to give up, or your wife said, John, knock it off, just give it in. No, I was discouraged, but never felt that I should stop the effort to try to convince people that LOR was indeed a viable solution about how to land on the moon. And I guess every negative aspect that I ran into charged me up all the more and more that I dedicated my whole soul and being to try to get across the fact that LOR was indeed the way that we should go to the moon. Okay, keep looking through, John. You know, I don't want it to be static, I want you to move around those around. What kind of things did people, it got kind of personal, didn't it, John?

What kind of things did people say after a while? It got extremely personal, I can remember one occasion in the presentation in Washington headquarters before the administrator, the associate administrator, Vaughan Brown, and the head of the Space Task Group, I got up and made a presentation on my concept at the time of how the moon mission, the Apollo mission, could be accomplished by using LOR, Lunar orbit rendezvous. In the course of that presentation, a person there hit the table violently and said, don't listen to him, his figures lie, his figures lie, just don't listen to him at that time. Siemens, who was a chairman at the meeting at times, I think we ought to adjourn for five minutes. But the argument continued out in the hallway. They were that much against LOR, they didn't even want to hear about it. Why these are intelligent people, these people, these people got us to the moon, John. I mean, what, let me ask again, because I want this on camera, okay? These were intelligent people, why, they were certainly capable of understanding what

you were talking about, why the resistance? Why the resistance to LOR, that's always been a favorite question that I'm asked. They, indeed, were intelligent people, a lot of people had made very great contributions but I have to reduce it possibly to the notion that they were set upon the original scheme that they conceived of, and that is the direct pipe mode. They didn't want anybody to interfere with it, and they just took the position, I think it was like, since it's not invented here, we don't want anything to do with it. And that's the chief reason I could come up with, that they didn't want somebody trotting on their territory and changing their minds, and they were pretty, was it for us about sticking to their notion that the direct pipe way was the only way to do it. Oddly enough, I felt the direct way could never work, and that's why I was so much, so to speak enamored in trying to really get across the point that LOR was the only viable

way that we could perform the Apollo lunar landing mission. If that curiosity could direct a set ever have worked, maybe not in the deadline, but could it have been made to work? It is my belief to this day that the direct flight mode would never have worked, and I not the only one that feels about that. Matter of fact, George Lowe, who, indeed, was one of the managers of the Apollo project, wrote to me before he died, that he said, John, I can safely say that if we had not adopted the LOR mode, we probably would still not be on the moon, because all other methods would have been so troublesome that they would have failed in the course of development. So I've had other people now share the feelings. Matter of fact, I think Robert Siemens, who was an associate minister at the time, also is of that same feeling now. John, in selling the project, what kind of things did you have to do to sell this idea?

What was some of the problems of trying to get the point across that LOR was indeed a viable way to go to the moon. I had to resort to all sorts of efforts, writing memos, giving speeches day after day, presentation to make a mathematical analysis, trying to show other people the extreme benefits that LOR offered, and as a matter of fact, one of the things I did is make a little mechanical gadget to, more or less, try to demonstrate the fundamentals of rendezvous, and it's depicted here. This is a case of a satellite going in orbit around the earth as the earth turns. And by this, we can demonstrate the severe timing problem that rendezvous had, that you might have to wait 17 days, 34 days before the time was appropriate, that you could send up another vehicle to make a rendezvous. But we learned from this, and by mathematical analysis, that if we made the latitude of the launch site equal to the orbital inclination of the satellite, that indeed we had a rendezvous

possibility four times each day, and because of mathematical analysis, demonstration of this sort, that I had to resort to big charts, presentation after presentation, that I used to try to convince people that indeed at least study LOR, because I was convinced that they wouldn't even study it to begin with, but I was convinced that if we caused it to study it, they too would then see the merits of LOR, which is more or less the tactic I finally had to use, is make them study it, and then they will understand and appreciate the benefits of LOR. Go ahead and wind it around for me if you would. Here we have earth rotating, and the satellite going around at the same time, and you see right now, if we launched from Florida, which is facing me right here, there would take a long time, many revolutions before Florida would come into view, and before we had a chance

to launch off the Cape to make a rendezvous with the satellite already in orbit. Do you turn it until the floor is on our side? No, I think we probably have passed it. Go backwards. 188. First take. Yeah. John, did you invent lunar orbit rendezvous? I won't say, did I invent lunar orbit rendezvous? I will not say that I'm the sold inventor of lunar orbit rendezvous. Other people had similar notions, matter of fact, you can go back in history now that came up afterwards that some time ago, a Russian had more or less invented, or sold to speak, they claimed the invented it 50, 60 years ago. But I do say this, I was an independent inventor of LOR. It was my own analysis that I made to convince me that LOR was indeed the proper solution to go to the moon.

I made the analysis, and then at the same time, I think this is where history gets involved, I became the only advocate and the main crusader to keep it going to eventually get people to think in terms of the fact that indeed LOR was a good way of doing it. And it was my analysis, I had access to no other persons analysis that convinced me it was to do the mathematical analysis itself. But such things as, the weight going to the moon would be only one-third to one-half of the weight if we did it any other way. Show me that truck, let's have a big truck right there. What is that? Bring it over and show it to me. Let me try to explain a little thing about what would have been involved if we had to look at three different modes for going to the moon. Just talking to me. So the so-called direct flight mode, which they called using the Nova Vicar, which is depicted here, look at it in comparison to the Washington Monument. Washington Monument has a base diameter of 55 feet.

Nova has a base diameter of 60, and it would have grown in size. Even that's something that weighed 12 to 14 million pounds. Now would have taken that's direct flight. And that the so-called direct flight mode. The second mode that became under consideration was the Earth-Obert-Rondovoo mode, which involved two Saturn V vehicles. Saturn would be a tanker that would be put in orbit and had fuel in it. They'd send up the second one and make a Rondovoo with the tanker transfer fuel from here to here and then in Earth-Obert-Rondovoo, that is correct. Then this is the vehicle that would go to the moon, but what would go to the moon would be identical to what it would be in the direct flight mode. My notion was if it wouldn't work here, it wouldn't work here. The moon or orbit-Rondovoo, by contrast, involved only one vehicle. So there's a proof right there, one vehicle versus two. This was half the weight as necessary to do it by Earth-Obert-Rondovoo. The one vehicle with the Saturn V, having a thrust of only 7 million pounds compared

to 14 over there, would do the entire job and provide a great level of safety that neither one of these modes would produce. So that was the way to go. And so to me, this was the only way that could be done and there are people who this day feel that, yes, if we hadn't adopted this, we still would not be on the moon. Great. Okay, good. Okay. Yep. That's it. That's it. That's it. This picture paper, in my mind, represents a very important point of history.

It's the attachment that I made to my minority report. My new people wouldn't read reports that might have 30 or 50 pages in it. So what I did here was follow the concept of an admiral's page to summarize everything on a single sheet of paper, and that's what this has done. It showed all the research that we had done, it depicted the three different modes that were under consideration. It showed the benefits of LOR here relative to Earth-Obert-O-Dreck-Flight Mode. I made a probability of success study over here. It showed the flexibility of using LOR and, as a matter of fact, it brings out the notion that there's no need for really having a single lander go down to the moon. We could put two small landers and have the rescue possibility because of that.

Then we studied the various kinds of lunar excursion vehicles or limbs that could be used. So we termed them at that time from a compact or few-string model to an economy type, to the plush type, which the one that was eventually developed. This simply represents different fuel combinations. Then over here I listed all the salient advantages that was offered by LOR, finally summarized with the basic points about the real benefits of LOR, the salient points, basic simplicity. It allowed the job to be done quicker. It obviates the need for large boosters. It requires fewer boosters. It requires the least development, requires the least number of facilities, and it minimizes operational problems. And at the same time, it reduced the cost to one half of what it would have been if we had tried to do it any other way from save, about 45 to 50 million dollars that reduced

it to 25 million dollars, which is a very significant saving. And as a matter of fact, I have always felt that if we had tried to do it by the direct flight mode, it would have failed and might have been jeopardized the whole agency because of that. At the same time, costing doubled the amount of money that it really did involved by using LOR. You want to get it tight right there while he's in that lake from the side so it's almost a solid way, okay, and sink still?

Bring it up close to your face and look at it, John. And get another one and bring it up close to your face, you're going to put it in real tight. Yeah, if you could hold it closer even, really close up to your eyes, it looks unnatural but if you could do that, put it right up close to your eyes. John, just one last question, that is, how did you finally feel when they said, you're

right, John, this is the way to go? I never did ask you that. You can look at me and tell me. How did I feel when the decision was finally made? Well, I'll give you a little antidote that went with it. I was in Paris at the time, actually giving a paper on rendezvous before von Karman, very renowned scientist. And a colleague who was with me and he saw in the New York Herald Tribune the next day, NASA has adopted LOR. I hadn't seen the article. He came up to me and says, John, they've adopted your eye to your congratulations, shook my hand. He says, I can safely say I'm shaking hands with the man who single-handedly has saved the government $25 billion. That was a pretty nice compliment. There's another piece of paper. Okay, John.

This is the one. Okay, go ahead, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you.