When President
John F. Kennedy said in 1961 America would put a man on the Moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade he set
NASA an unimaginable task. To build a rocket capable of traveling the 384,400 km to the moon, Safely land, take off from the moon and return to earth with the technology available in the sixties would be a monumental task. Let's face it
The Wright Brothers had just achieved the first manned flight on earth fifty years earlier and that only went 120 feet.
The original plan was to fly a rocket all the way to the moon and land the complete rocket on the surface. This was indeed the plan for quiet some time, but how do you land a huge rocket on the moon, how would the astronauts get out of the 70 ft rocket and how much fuel would be needed to take off again ? One man at
NASA had a different Idea, his name was
John Houbolt but not being one of the main engineering team he struggled to get his voice heard. It was Houbolt that formulated the idea for a craft that would shuttle to the moon while the mother ship stayed in orbit, then the craft could return and dock with the mother ship.
But
Wernher von Braun was the NASA expert on rockets and the face of the
Apollo project, he was married to the Full rocket landing approach and cast Houbolt and his ideas aside. But with the full rocket idea not looking feasible Houbolt went over von Braun's head to
Bob Seamans an Associate Administrator. Houbolt feared this action could get him fired but while Seamans was unsure he decided to at least let Houbolt present his idea for consideration.
In the documentary we see how von Braun eventually came around to the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) idea. We meet with the people at
Grumman Aircraft tasked with making the Lunar Module. And the enormous part the Lunar Excursion Module played in the Apollo missions from the first Moon landing module called The Eagle to the Apollo 13 mission when the module was used to save the lives of the three astronauts aboard.
