Free Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox Page A

Haeussermann—distinguished and courtly, talking about “ze vay ve do sings,” very models of the rocket scientist—and Americans like Alexander A. McCool of Vicksburg, Mississippi, an esteemed propulsion expert, talking about “that thang” (meaning the rocket) which “hauled tail.” Somehow, everyone understood what everyone else was talking about.

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    Coincidentally with the addition of von Braun’s team to NASA, momentum for a lunar program began to build. On the same day that Eisenhower signed the executive order creating Marshall, Bob Gilruth held a management meeting at Langley. It was time to begin the preliminary design of a multi-man spacecraft, he told them. They should think in terms of a crew of three. The mission would probably be a circumlunar flight, but they should keep other possibilities open. Bob Piland would direct the group.
    A few months later, on the first Thursday of the new year, 1960, Keith Glennan gave his approval to the Goett Committee’s final conclusion. Henceforth, the agency would take the position that, following Mercury, NASA should aim in the direction of a manned lunar landing. Just one week later, Glennan got a letter from Eisenhower: “You are hereby directed,” Eisenhower wrote, “to accelerate the super booster program for which your agency recently was given technical and management responsibility.” That meant the Saturn. It was the first signal that Eisenhower might support a manned space program beyond Mercury.
    That same January of 1960, the Apollo spacecraft was baptized by Abe Silverstein, head of the Office of Space Flight Programs. Silverstein had named Mercury a year earlier (Silverstein liked the image of a messenger in the sky), and since von Braun had named his new launch vehicle Saturn, another Greek god seemed to Silverstein like a natural choice. He remembered from his grade-school days the story of the god who rode the chariot of the sun drawn by four winged horses—Apollo, the child of Zeus. Silverstein, the meticulous research engineer, went back to his old book of myths and determined that Apollo hadn’t done anything that “wouldn’t be appropriate.”
    Soon after, Silverstein tried out his idea on Gilruth, Faget, and Charles Donlan, Gilruth’s deputy director in the Space Task Group. The four men were discussing the new post-Mercury spacecraft over lunch at a little restaurant near Dolley Madison House. In the middle of the meal Silverstein said suddenly, “There ought to be a name for this that stands out in people’s minds. You know, something like ‘Apollo,’ for example. I’m not saying you ought to name it ‘Apollo’ necessarily, but something like that.” And then throughout the rest of the lunch, Donlan recalled, he kept calling this new spacecraft “Apollo,” seeing how it would wear. It wore pretty well, and the spacecraft became Apollo. Silverstein didn’t have to bother with things like public relations departments. “I had the whole program,” Silverstein said simply. “I was naming the spacecraft like I’d name my baby.”

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    Even as NASA began to lay plans to send men to the moon, launching one man into earth orbit continued to be a struggle. The original date for the first manned flight, a suborbital flight once scheduled for January 1960, had come and gone, and the revised goal kept slipping later and later into 1960. Both Atlas and capsule were plagued with problems, and no one was promising much in the way of improvement. The chilling message that the Air Force continued to pass on to the Space Task Group was this: By mid-1961, when the first manned orbital flight was planned, the reliability of the Atlas would still be only 75 percent. The Space Task Group could expect to lose one out of four Atlases during the launch phase.
    This gloomy projection seemed vindicated on July 29, 1960, when they tried to fly M.A.-1, the first time that a production Mercury capsule (not just a boilerplate model) was mated to an