Apollo started as a spacecraft project, not a plan to land on the Moon
When NASA manager Abe Silverstein picked the name Apollo one evening in early 1960, picturing the god driving his chariot across the Sun, nobody had committed to a lunar landing. The plan was a three-seat successor to the Mercury capsule. Within a decade it had consumed $25 billion and employed 400,000 people at its peak.
Apollo was conceived under President Eisenhower as a follow-on to Mercury, whose capsule carried a single astronaut. Its possible uses included ferrying crews to a space station or looping around the Moon, with a landing as a distant option. In 1960 NASA commissioned design studies from three contractors while engineer Maxime Faget's in-house team drew up its own spacecraft as a yardstick. John Kennedy, elected that November, was initially wary of the cost and knew little of the technical details.
Yuri Gagarin's orbit in April 1961 changed the politics. Kennedy asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to review the space effort, and Johnson concluded that a lunar landing lay far enough ahead for America to win. In May, Kennedy asked Congress to commit to the Moon when only one American had been to space and none had orbited; some NASA staff doubted it could be done. By 1963 he was close to accepting a joint landing with the Soviet Union to avoid duplication. Once the goal was fixed, NASA scrapped the three industry studies and adopted Faget's design, and North American Aviation won the contract to build it even though Martin's bid had rated higher.
The expansion was enormous: more than 20,000 companies and universities, a new Manned Spacecraft Center on land in Houston donated by Rice University, and a vast launch site on Merritt Island in Florida. Setbacks were real. In 1967 fire swept the Apollo 1 cabin during a ground test, killing its three astronauts. In 1970 an oxygen tank burst on Apollo 13 on the way to the Moon, and the crew survived by using the lunar module as a lifeboat.
Apollo 8 became the first crewed flight to orbit another world, and six missions landed a total of twelve people between 1969 and December 1972, when Apollo 17 closed the series. Budget cuts cancelled three further landings. The crews brought home 382 kilograms of lunar rock, and the program pushed forward computing, avionics and telecommunications. The next people to travel beyond low Earth orbit flew around the Moon on Artemis II in 2026.
Source: Apollo program
