Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...building the team, NASA all but threw away the rule book. It was clear, for example, that university brains would have to be tapped. But instead of following the usual practice of giving Government scholarships directly to stu dents, and allowing the students to shop for berths at a few Ivy League universities, NASA turned the money ($100 million so far) over to a large number of universities, thus ensuring greater cross-fertilization of ideas...
...John C. Houbolt, 50, former chief of theoretical mechanics at NASA's Langley Research Laboratories in Hampton, Va. Houbolt, a civil engineer, is responsible for the lunar-orbit rendezvous that is the key maneuver in Apollo's entire flight plan. In what he remembers as "an intuitive flash," Houbolt realized that tremendous weight savings would be gained by this rendezvous method, permitting the use of a smaller launch vehicle. Often scorned by colleagues, Houbolt fought a two-year battle, finally put his job on the line by appealing directly to NASA headquarters. His arguments prevailed in the fall...
...Charles Stark Draper, 67, director of the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To solve the problems of navigation, NASA went straight to the nation's leading authority on inertial guidance. The system devised by Draper for Apollo includes telescopes, a sextant, and a computerized inertial reference "platform" that tells astronauts where they are in space, where they are headed and how fast. But how could they be sure that it would work?, the NASA brass wanted to know. "I told them I'd go along and run it myself," recalls Draper. The on-board navigation...
Other men were almost as indispensable. Maxime A. Faget, director of engineering and development at Houston's Manned Spaceflight Center, designed Apollo's command and service module. Dr. George E. Mueller, NASA's top official for manned spaceflight, introduced a time-saving technique known as "all-up testing," in which all three rocket stages are tested together. Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations since 1961, and George Low, manager of the Apollo program, brought a sense of cool discipline to the nerve-racking operations in Houston...
...extensive sketches of the President's two brothers. "It's purely interpretive. I have nothing to equate it with. I don't know whether it is like him or unlike him." Still, the young artist must be doing something right: he has been commissioned by NASA authorities to join Robert Rauschenberg, John Meigs and William Thon at Cape Kennedy to sketch his impressions of this week's scheduled Apollo 11 blastoff to the moon...