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In the Spring of 1961 President John Kennedy challenged his country to place humans on the moon and return them to Earth by the end of the decade.
It seemed an audacious proposal to outside observers, but also to the heads of
the two-year old National Aeronautics and Space Agency.
What had been lost in the political cloud and excitement surrounding the
President's challenge was the fact that there were people in the aerospace
community, outside of NASA, who were sure that a manned mission to the
moon was possible within ten years, and they had known this since at least
1958, when NASA didn't even exist.
These enthusiastic advocates included the German rocket scientists working
for the Army under Wernher von Braun; a team of military engineers working
for the U.S. Air Force under General Bernard Schriever; and a team of
engineers working under Conrad Lau at the Vought Aircraft Astronautics
Division whose efforts remained largely unknown.
Between the Spring of 1958 and Christmas 1959 Lau and his team worked
out the most effective way to get to the moon using the advanced rockets
being proposed by von Braun's team.
Following a visit by their ebullient congressman, Olin Teague, Vought's
manager John Clark sent Lau's report to Abe Silverstein, head of manned
space flight at NASA. Less than a month later Silverstein ordered his advanced
design leader, Robert Piland, to essentially
work from Lau's ideas to create a modular
spacecraft system for Apollo. It would be two
years later that NASA would then adopt the
method resurrected by Lau to leave the main
spacecraft in lunar orbit to save fuel.
Only ten copies of this report were distributed
- until now.
Project MALLAR is the 100th book in the
acclaimed Apogee Books' Space Series. |
