WHO MADE IT POSSIBLE

IF teamwork and a sense of shared responsibility were crucial factors in the U.S. effort to land men on the moon, so were the contributions made by a number of individuals. By providing the answers to such questions as how to build a big enough booster, what flight plan to follow, and how to guide the spacecraft, these men eliminated obstacles that might have delayed the program indefinitely. Among the men:

P: Dr. John C. Houbolt, 50, former chief of theoretical mechanics at NASA's Langley Research Laboratories in Hampton, Va. Houbolt, a civil engineer, is responsible for the lunar-orbit rendezvous that is the key maneuver in Apollo's entire flight plan. In what he remembers as "an intuitive flash," Houbolt realized that tremendous weight savings would be gained by this rendezvous method, permitting the use of a smaller launch vehicle. Often scorned by colleagues, Houbolt fought a two-year battle, finally put his job on the line by appealing directly to NASA headquarters. His arguments prevailed in the fall of 1962.

P: Dr. Wernher von Braun, 57, director of the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Transported to the U.S. by American intelligence officials in 1945, along with 126 other German scientists who had been working on the V-2 rocket at the Baltic base of Peenemuende, Von Braun has directed development of rocket-launch vehicles from the earliest Redstone. Von Braun helped develop the ablative heat shield, which dissipates the searing heat of reentry by flaking off in harmless fiery pieces. His Huntsville group can also claim credit for what has become known in the space agency as "cluster's last stand"--the grouping of several smaller rockets in a cluster to provide as much thrust as would a single, far larger rocket engine. Saturn 5's first stage, for example, uses five F-1 engines, each generating 1,500,000 lbs. of thrust. Von Braun, perhaps more than any other man, has been the driving force behind the moon program.

P: Dr. Charles Stark Draper, 67, director of the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To solve the problems of navigation, NASA went straight to the nation's leading authority on inertial guidance. The system devised by Draper for Apollo includes telescopes, a sextant, and a computerized inertial reference "platform" that tells astronauts where they are in space, where they are headed and how fast. But how could they be sure that it would work?, the NASA brass wanted to know. "I told them I'd go along and run it myself," recalls Draper. The on-board navigation systems have proved so accurate that, if they had to, the crew of Columbia could fly to the moon and back without help from ground controllers.

Other men were almost as indispensable. Maxime A. Faget, director of engineering and development at Houston's Manned Spaceflight Center, designed Apollo's command and service module. Dr. George E. Mueller, NASA's top official for manned spaceflight, introduced a time-saving technique known as "all-up testing," in which all three rocket stages are tested together. Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations since 1961, and George Low, manager of the Apollo program, brought a sense of cool discipline to the nerve-racking operations in Houston.

Then, too, there is Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton, the man who selects and trains the astronauts. The professionalism of the Apollo crews is a reflection of Slayton's success--but leaves him less than totally fulfilled. Though he was chosen as one of the original seven U.S. astronauts in 1959, a mild heart murmur prevented him from ever venturing into space. When he was asked recently what he would best like to be remembered for, Slayton replied: "As the pilot of Apollo 11." There was no smile on his craggy face.

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