President John Kennedy announced the Apollo manned lunar program on May 25, 1961, at a time when the Soviet Union seemed far ahead in Moon exploration. The USSR had crashed the first spacecraft into the Moon, and had taken the historic first photographs of the Moon's far side. The U.S. was a total failure at Moon shots -- nine straight attempts had blown up on the launch pad or malfunctioned in flight.
President Kennedy's key goal was making America the leader in Moon exploration by getting there first. Other goals, such as economic use of lunar resources or scientific knowledge, were secondary. NASA concentrated on winning the race. This led to several important design decisions:
-- Throw-away spacecraft and rockets, because expendable hardware is less expensive and time-consuming to design than reusable equipment.
-- Moon expeditions based on the launch of a single rocket and spacecraft directly to the Moon, rather than launching several rockets and assembling a Moon expedition in Earth orbit.
Expendable rockets and the direct-to-the-Moon trajectory meant that every new mission was as expensive as the previous flight. Every rocket and spacecraft had to be bought fresh for each mission. A space station in Earth orbit could have functioned as a lunar base camp, providing a place to store trans-lunar spacecraft. However, such a base camp would have added several years to the Apollo schedule, risking a Soviet triumph.
The first Apollo launch took place May 28, 1964, when a Saturn 1 rocket placed an unmanned crew capsule into orbit.
Apollo 1 fire
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A disastrous fire on June 27, 1967, killed three astronauts during a ground simulation. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee weren't able to escape due to poorly designed hatches and a 100% oxygen atmosphere that made much of the capsule extremely flammable. The Command Module was redesigned and the atmosphere changed to a safer nitrogen-oxygen mix during launch. The tragic ground simulation was renamed as the Apollo 1 mission after the fire.
