Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

Disher recorded events in the stenographic notebooks he carried everywhere. His book for the fall of 1960 reveals that the first meeting of George Low’s working group convened on Friday, October 21, 1960, at 2 P.M. From then on, the pace steadily accelerated. By November 8, Disher’s notes reveal, they were talking about spacecraft weights. On the twenty-second of that month, they met with Milt Trageser of M.I.T. about the requirements for the navigation and guidance system.
    At the end of November, Faget called with encouraging news from his latest visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center: “M.S.F.C. is eager,” Disher recorded, meaning that von Braun would throw his weight behind a lunar landing. By December, the group began discussing the question of artificial gravity. Would it be needed on a lunar mission? If so, should it be continuous or periodic? And what about radiation from solar flares? Could a solar flare be predicted? What were the odds that a big one would occur during a mission? What would happen to the crew if it did?
    Low’s people also worried during these first weeks about the nature of the lunar surface. Was it firm and rocky? Or was the surface covered with several feet of fine dust, so that a spacecraft coming in for a landing would sink without a trace? There were advocates for both positions, and nobody really knew. At least finding a flat landing place didn’t seem to be a problem, Disher noted: “Good pick of landing sites this side of moon.”
    Everything was new. Low’s group held few formal meetings, but they would call in people who looked as if they knew something about the problem at hand, quiz them, and then add the information to their growing store of data. The committee itself kept expanding to include others in NASA who were becoming interested.
    By the thirteenth of December, they had a piece of paper with a Proposed Flight Schedule on it. It was presumptuous, trying to define a time schedule for a task they still only barely understood. This first, almost completely uninformed but prescient estimation showed the circumlunar missions taking place in 1967–1968 and the lunar landings taking place in 1969–1970.
    On Thursday, January 5, 1961, Low’s group faced its first major review by top NASA officials. On the basis of the review, they would decide whether to pursue the lunar mission aggressively under the new Administration or to table it instead and take a less ambitious, more self-protective stance. Low and his confederates gathered at lunchtime on Tuesday to rehearse their presentation on Silverstein.
    First, they decided, no more of the “man-on-the-moon” language they had been using—it was too slangy, too likely to be ridiculed. “Manned lunar landing” would be the phrase for what they wanted to do. It was also obvious to Silverstein that they had better not pretend to be farther along than they really were. In fact, Silverstein said, they ought to emphasize that this was not a coordinated set of presentations. This was known around NASA as “the country-boy treatment,” Disher explained later. “You could have been spending your life on it, but you go in and say, ‘This is just something we threw together.’ It helped disarm people sometimes.”
    Low followed his instructions (the minutes of the review specify that the nine presentations were only a “first cut”), and Glennan gave Low what he wanted, a go-ahead for lunar landing work to continue. Glennan even made the group legitimate, converting them into the “Low Committee” with a mandate to answer the question “What is NASA’s Manned Lunar Landing Program?” For Low’s people, it was exhilarating. At the same time that Bob Seamans was fretting about NASA’s future as an agency and John Kennedy was wishing that he could get rid of Mercury, John Disher thought that they were halfway to putting a lunar landing program on NASA’s schedule.
    Bob Seamans knew things that other people didn’t,