(The following originally appeared in my space blog for EE Times.)
NASA is looking for new ways to return humans to the moon via a project called Artemis. In their wisdom, agency management had the good sense recently to invite a talk by a chronicler of the original moon landing program, Project Apollo, and one that efforts’ greatest and most unsung engineering heroes.
His name was John Houbolt, and his was a voice in the wilderness.
Houbolt, trained as a civil engineer, arrived at NASA at the dawn of the Space Race. That training acquainted him with the central limiting factor in spaceflight: weight. The Soviets were running circles around NASA as a U.S. president, seizing on a single 15-minute suborbital flight in May 1961, proposed a U.S. moon landing by the end of the decade.
John Houbolt kept running the numbers.
NASA’s immediate challenge after President John F. Kennedy’s moon landing speech: By what “mode” could humans be launched to the lunar surface, then brought home? Our German rocket scientists in Huntsville, Alabama, wanted to go big, via a mode dubbed “direct ascent.” Unresolved was how a huge lander could be guided down to the lunar surface, then lift off? How would the astronauts climb down a structure resembling a water tower? Before anyone else within NASA’s Space Task Group, Houbolt concluded direct ascent wouldn’t work. The numbers simply did not add up, nor did the physics.
(Nor would another mode, Earth orbit rendezvous, requiring multiple launches to assemble a lander in low-earth orbit.)
Reducing the weight, mastering orbital mechanics, Houbolt instead proposed a weight- and money-saving approach called LOR, for lunar orbit rendezvous. The design engineers and mathematicians at NASA’s Langley Research Center, initially thought Houbolt a “crank,” out of his depth.
“His numbers lie!” the legendary spacecraft designer Maxime Faget told Houbolt in front of his colleagues.
A lesser engineer would have slunk away in disgrace. Wounded, Houbolt persisted.
In the course of his LOR crusade, the engineer built a “globe gadget” to demonstrate the intricacies of rendezvous. It consisted of a store-bought globe and a small ball at the end of a piece of coat hanger representing the rendezvous target. It was rudimentary, but effective: The visual aid, along with minority reports and dogged determination, helped Houbolt, make the case for LOR during a series of NASA design meetings and aerospace conferences.
In his account of Houbolt’s quest and the bureaucratic twists and turns that was the story of LOR, author William Causey documents a legacy of engineering integrity, career-risking perseverance and an unshakeable belief that numbers do not lie.
That, and the fact that one determined individual can change the course of history.
The confrontation with Faget (of whom, some of the early astronauts remarked, stood for “Flat-Ass Guess Every Time”) steeled the obscure Langley engineer. In November 1961, jumping NASA’s chain of command, Houbolt fired off a memo to Robert Seamans, NASA’s associate administrator, forcefully—some thought impertinently— making the case for LOR.
In his declaration to Seamans, Houbolt acknowledged he was risking his career, yet felt compelled to advocate for LOR. “Houbolt didn’t say, ‘I think it’s one way.’ He didn’t say, ‘It’s the best way.’ He said, ‘I think it’s the only way’,” Causey notes.
Miffed, Seamans nevertheless decided to take a closer look at LOR. By mid-1962, Houbolt’s pain-in-the-neck persistence had paid off. The Huntsville rocketeers led by Wernher von Braun, at long last acknowledged that LOR was in fact the only mode by which to reach the moon by Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline. Houbolt’s mode also saved billions of dollars in an endeavor that would cost nearly $25 billion, along with the lives of three Apollo astronauts in a 1967 launchpad fire.
After Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, Wernher von Braun scanned the gallery at Mission Control in Houston. The cigars had been lit, flags waving, Kennedy’s technological deadline had been met. We had done what we said we would do.
Spotting Houbolt in the gallery, von Braun saluted the engineer who had crunched the numbers and clung tenaciously to a sound engineering concept for exploring the solar system while risking his career. Precisely what von Braun said is unclear, but it amounted to this: John, we wouldn’t have made to the moon and back without you.
Causey mentioned Houbolt’s globe gadget during NASA lecture. It was a story the Artemis engineers needed to hear. The author may have gotten through to them: One program engineer suggested rebuilding Houbolt’s globe gadget. Indeed, Globe Gadget 2.0 would be a fitting tribute to the engineer who risked all to reach another world.
And it must just help us return.
George Leopold's Blog 