The Man Who Knew The Way to the Moon
The story of John C. Houbolt, an unsung hero of Apollo 11 and the man who showed NASA how to put America on the moon.
Without John C. Houbolt, a junior engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon.
Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth. It's the scenario used in 1950s cartoons and horror movies about traveling to outer space.
Houbolt had another idea: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR would link two spacecraft in orbit... more
Without John C. Houbolt, a junior engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon.
Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth. It's the scenario used in 1950s cartoons and horror movies about traveling to outer space.
Houbolt had another idea: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR would link two spacecraft in orbit... more