Word: houbolt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...little craft that is officially named the Lunar Module (LM) but is becoming known as "the Spider." Scheduled to be tested in manned flight for the first time next week during the flight of Apollo 9, the Spider is the homely offspring of a concept of Aeronautical Engineer John Houbolt, an unsung hero of the U.S. space program. NASA officials now agree that without Houbolt's lonely campaign early in the 1960s, the U.S. would have been hard pressed to meet John Kennedy's goal of landing men on the moon before...
While the various factions wrangled, Engineer Houbolt, whose work at NASA's Langley Research Center was not directly connected with space flight, was impressed by still another moon-landing technique: the lunar-orbit rendezvous. Houbolt's plan was to leave the mother craft in orbit around the moon while a light, ferrylike craft descended from it to the lunar surface carrying only one or two of the astronauts. Later, the little craft could blast off, rendezvous and dock with the mother ship, and then be left behind in lunar orbit as the astronauts returned to earth...