DESTINATION MOON: A History of the
Lunar Orbiter Program
PREFACE
[v] In June 1967, as a
member of the NASA History Office Summer Seminar, I began work on
a history of the Lunar Orbiter Program, then in its operational
phase. My objective was to document the origins of the program and
to record the activity of the missions in progress. I also wanted
to study the technical and management aspects of the lunar orbital
reconnaissance that would provide the Apollo Program with
photographic and selenodetic data for evaluating the proposed
astronaut landing sites.
Lunar Orbiter brought several new
departures in U.S. efforts to explore the Moon before landing men
there. It was the first big deep space project for Langley
Research Center. It came into being in 1963 after the Ranger and
Surveyor Programs were well along in their development and at a
time when the data it could acquire would be timely to Apollo only
for mission design, not for equipment design, since the decisions
on the basic Apollo equipment had already been made. Although
Lunar Orbiter was not a "crash" effort, it did require that
Langley Research Center set up a development and testing schedule
in which various phases of the project would run nearly
concurrently. This approach had not been tried before on a major
lunar program.
Research led me first to the Office of
Space Science and Applications at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
I discussed the project with Lunar Orbiter Program officials and
received help and encouragement from Oran W. Nicks, the Director
of Lunar and Planetary Programs (later Deputy Director of Langley
Research Center); Lee R. Scherer, then Lunar Orbiter Program
Director (later Director of Kennedy Space Center); and Leon J.
Kosofsky, Lunar Orbiter program engineer. Complete chronological
files of the Lunar Orbiter Program Office enabled me to outline
the basic developments since the inception of Lunar
Orbiter.
After studying files in Washington and at
Langley Research Center and interviewing project officials, I went
to Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch of Lunar Orbiter 5, the
last mission of the program. There I interviewed program officials
and Boeing and Eastman Kodak contractor representatives. Back in
Washington, I wrote a preliminary manuscript about the program,
for limited circulation among NASA offices as a Historical
Note.
[vi] I returned to
NASA Headquarters in the summers of 1968, 1969 and 1970 to expand
my study of the program-one of NASA's major successes before the
Apollo landings. In early June 1969, I was assigned to the Apollo
Lunar Planning Office, whose director, Scherer, had encouraged me
throughout the first two summers of research. In his office, I
could see how Lunar Orbiter photographic data were being used in
planning the Apollo
11 landing and subsequent missions.
I conducted additional interviews and discussed results of Orbiter
missions with Dr. Farouk El-Baz and Dennis James of Bellcomm, a
consulting firm supporting NASA on Apollo. Through these talks I
learned the technical and scientific significance of much of the
Orbiter photography and how it was being applied. I went again to
Langley, with new questions. Many of the former Lunar Orbiter
project officials were occupied with a new planetary program: the
Viking Program to explore Mars. Lunar Orbiter was history for
them, but the experience from that program was already helping
them in their newest endeavor. As this manuscript goes to press
the two dual-role Viking spacecraft have successfully orbited Mars
and sent two landers to the Martian surface. These craft have
conducted numerous experiments to search for signs of life and to
give us our first detailed views of the Martian landscape.
During the remainder of 1969 and in the
summer of 1970 I worked to complete the draft of the history
contained in the following pages. I submitted the manuscript in
June 1971, shortly before beginning my present career as a Foreign
Service officer.
The decade of the sixties was filled with
turbulence, discontent, and upheaval. It also was a time of
outstanding achievements in advancing our knowledge of the world
in which we live. We accelerated the exploration of our planet
from space. We landed men on the Moon, brought them safely home
again, and learned how they could survivein space. And we
began sending unmanned planetary explorers to chart the solar
system and to search for signs of life on Mars. It is the purpose
of this history to recount one chapter in this exploration, as a
small contribution to the store of knowledge about America's first
voyages on the new ocean of space.
I am grateful to the NASA History Office,
whose staff have enabled me to write this history. I dedicate it
to all the people who worked to make Lunar Orbiter the success it
wasthat they might have a record of their accomplishments to share
with future generations.