Author Description

This is an excellent history of the historic Lunar Orbiter project in the 1960s leading to America's Apollo moon landing. 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. Chapter I - Unmanned Lunar Exploration and the Need for a Lunar Orbiter * The Call for a Program of Exploration * Mustering for the Challenge of Space * Chapter II - Toward a Lightweight Lunar Orbiter * The Surveyor Program * Early Apollo Impact on Lunar Orbiter Planning * The Centaur Rocket Program * The Search for a Lightweight Orbiter * OSS-OMSF Cooperative Planning * The Scherer Group's Report * Problems at JPL * Langley Enters the Picture * Establishing Management Arrangements * Langley Develops the Request for Proposal Document * Stipulations of the Request for Proposal Document * Chapter III - Beginning the Lunar Orbiter Program * Congress questions NASA on Orbiter * The Lunar Orbiter Project Office is Established * Preparing for Contract Bids * The Langley Source Evaluation Board * The Lunar Orbiter Proposals * The Boeing Lunar Orbiter Proposal * The Eastman Kodak Photographic System * Selecting the Lunar Orbiter Contractor * Chapter IV - NASA and Boeing Negotiate a Contract * Early Boeing Preparations * NASA Preparations for Contract Negotiations * Congressional Criticism of Contractor Choice * No Duplicati