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

Atlas. They launched after a heavy rain, under overcast skies. M.A.-1 lifted from the pad, engines roaring, everything looking good. Then a minute into flight, out of sight beyond the clouds, it blew up during the period of “max q,” maximum dynamic pressure, at an altitude of about 32,000 feet. No one knew why. All they knew was that two signals to abort the flight had been sent by sensors monitoring electrical power and thrust. Their assumption had to be that both the Atlas and the Mercury were still seriously flawed vehicles.

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    NASA continued to plan for the future in the teeth of present adversity. The very day that M.A.-1 blew up, steps toward Apollo were being taken in Washington. NASA had called together representatives from the aerospace industry to introduce their plans for the sequel to Project Mercury. The day before the launch, they gathered in a State Department auditorium that John Disher had borrowed for the occasion—NASA wasn’t big enough to have an auditorium of its own—and Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden used the name “Apollo” for the first time in public. George Low made a speech, telling his audience that during the 1960s NASA hoped to build a space station in low earth orbit and to conduct a circumlunar flight. Perhaps during the 1970s, if all went well, NASA would land on the moon.
    On the second day of the conference, July 29, even as recovery teams were preparing to retrieve the pieces of M.A.-1 from the ocean floor, Max Faget addressed the group on the topic of a lunar landing. In the middle of his speech, Faget signaled to a confederate. The auditorium dimmed to a half-light that was somewhat darker than a heavily overcast day but brighter than a moonlit night.
    Faget waited while the audience murmured. When there was silence, he told them that this was what earthlight would look like to an astronaut standing on the moon in a lunar night with a full earth shining above him. It was at that moment, sitting in the twilight of the auditorium, that John Disher realized for the first time that they really were going to go to the moon—some day.
    Space station and a circumlunar flight: That was the immediate agenda. To get plans moving, NASA announced in August that three $250,000 contracts would be let for design studies of the Apollo spacecraft. The Request for Proposals specified that the spacecraft had to be compatible with the new Saturn and it had to be capable of a fourteen-day mission—more than enough time to get to the moon and back. The proposals were submitted on October 9, 1960.
    It was then, in the second week of October 1960, that a lunar landing moved from being an ambition to being a project. For one of the two men involved, Abe Silverstein, it was the natural next step—“the time had come,” he said later. And perhaps it was as simple as that. The other of the two men, George Low, was asked directly about it less than four years later by an interviewer. What motivated him to act then? “I knew you would ask that question,” said George Low, “and I don’t know… . This was the time, of course, that we were beginning to discuss with industry what the Apollo Program was… . And we felt it would be most important to have something in the files, to be prepared to move out with a bigger program, should there be a sudden change of heart within the Administration.”
    And yet it wasn’t quite as simple as that either. George Low, the most composed and deliberate of men, had an audacious streak, a fondness for the bold gesture that would break out repeatedly throughout his career. So probably it was a little of both. The time had come, but George Low also took it upon himself to give time, and history, a little nudge. Abe Silverstein’s recollection was that Low brought him his proposition sometime during the second week of October. It was the kind of thing to which Silverstein had said no in 1959, but with planning for the new spacecraft under way and with the Saturn