Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of NASA's Apollo Lunar Expeditions

656 Pages·2012·11.89 MB·English

by  Compton

“The Hammer and the Feather” by Alan Bean.
Reprinted by permission of Alan Bean.

Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note This Dover edition, first published in 2010, is an
unabridged republication of the work originally published in Washington, D.C.,
in 1989 in the NASA History Series as NASA SP-4214 under the title Where No
Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions. A new
Introduction by Paul Dickson has been added to this Dover edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Compton, William David,
1927– Where no man has gone before: a history of NASA’s Apollo lunar
expeditions / William David Compton; introduction to the Dover edition by Paul
Dickson.
p. cm.
Originally published: Washington, D.C. : National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, Office of Management, Scientific and Technical Information
Division, 1989.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9780486135564
1. Project Apollo (U.S.)—History. 2. Space flight to the moon—History. I.
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Scientific and
Technical Information Division. II. Title.

TL789.8.U6A528 2010
629.45’4—dc22
2010033543
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
47888201
www.doverpublications.com
INTRODUCTION TO THE
DOVER EDITION
The national goal of landing Americans on the moon—as set forth by President
John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961—had little or nothing to do with science.
America’s national honor had suffered from the Soviet Union’s early
accomplishments in space, as well as from terrestrial matters such as the
humiliation resulting from the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba the month
before the President’s space directive. So, the hope for primary benefit of the
excursion was a new sense of national honor. A second dividend of a lunar
landing would be the creation of a national capability to operate in deep space in
preparation for further exploration, beginning with the planet Mars.
The lunar landing and return to earth was a matter of engineering, not pure
science. The science was pretty much figured out by Sir Isaac Newton and a few
modern pioneers like Robert Goddard. In fact, one of the great misnomers of the
Space Age was to talk about “rocket scientists” and “rocket science” when the
appropriate terms were almost always “rocket engineers” and “rocket
engineering.”
The gulf between science and engineering during the early days of Apollo
often seemed too wide to close as a significant group of scientists opposed the
whole program. They argued that it was of negligible scientific value and that
better and cheaper science could be achieved with the use of robotic missions.
These were reasonable debating positions, but not ones that worked politically.
As William David Compton points out in his preface to Where No Man Has
Gone Before: “If the Soviets sent men and women to the moon, no American
robot, however sophisticated or important, would produce an equal impact on
the world’s consciousness. Hence, America’s leadership in space would be
asserted by landing humans on the moon.”
Compton’s lucid account of the Apollo missions that followed the Apollo 11
moon landing focuses on the ways in which scientists interested in the moon as a
base for observations and lunar samples, and engineers concerned with landing
and the return to earth resolved their differences and carried out a mission that
and the return to earth resolved their differences and carried out a mission that
made contributions to science and also developed remarkable engineering
achievements.
The first half of the book is devoted to preparations for subsequent lunar
landings, with the remainder detailing the lunar explorations that followed
Apollo 11, in which ten astronauts visited the moon and brought back lunar
samples for scientists to investigate. Data, photographs, and lunar samples in the
form of over 380 kilograms (841.54 pounds) of moon rocks brought to earth by
these astronauts and data from experiments they left on the moon, still
transmitting somewhat in 1977, began to give a picture of the moon’s origin and
nature, contributing to an understanding of how the earth had evolved.
The Apollo program concluded with Apollo 17 in December 1972 after 27
men had gone into lunar orbit. At the conclusion of the last mission a plaque was
left on the lunar surface by Gene Cernan which read: “This is our
commemoration that will be here until someone like us, until some of you who
are out there, who are the promise of the future, come back to read it again and
to further the exploration and the meaning of Apollo.”
The meaning of Apollo as explored in Compton’s narrative gives twenty-first
century readers an extremely valuable tool for understanding what we’ve learned
and are still learning from the data and the samples collected by the Apollo
astronauts. The Moon rocks, often derided as little more than costly souvenirs
when they were first returned to earth, are proving to have significant long-term
scientific value. It is a story which, over time, becomes more compelling as our
ability to analyze those decades-old lunar samples improves. Case in point: the
July 22, 2010 issue of Nature reported a new study from the California Institute
of Technology on a mineral (apatite) discovered in a volcanic rock from the
moon which was collected by Apollo 14 astronauts in 1971. According to the
researchers the mineral contained “robust evidence for the presence of water in
the interior of the moon from where some lunar rocks were derived.” Water on
the moon could mean that an occupied station on the moon becomes a more
likely possibility, because water would not have to be transported there from
earth.
The story of lunar spacecraft and the flight program leading up to the return of
Apollo 11 is detailed in Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned
Lunar Spacecraft to 1969, by Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, and
Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., which has been recently released as a Dover reprint
among other editions from the NASA Historical Series. As Compton points out
in the original introduction to Where No Man Has Gone Before, it is both a
parallel and a sequel to Chariots for Apollo. To have read both books is to have
experienced one of the greatest and most compelling stories of recent centuries.

PAUL DICKSON
September 2010
PREFACE
The purpose of this book is only partly to record the engineering and scientific
accomplishments of the men and women who made it possible for a human to
step away from his home planet for the first time. It is primarily an attempt to
show how scientists interested in the moon and engineers interested in landing
people on the moon worked out their differences and conducted a program that
was a major contribution to science as well as a stunning engineering
accomplishment.
When scientific requirements began to be imposed on manned space flight
operations, hardly any aspect was unaffected. The choice of landing sites, the
amount of scientific equipment that could be carried, and the weight of lunar
material that could be brought back all depended on the capabilities of the
spacecraft and mission operations. These considerations limited the earliest
missions and constituted the challenge of the later ones.
President John F. Kennedy’s decision to build the United States’ space
program around a manned lunar landing owed nothing to any scientific interest
in the moon. The primary dividend was to be national prestige, which had
suffered from the Soviet Union’s early accomplishments in space. A second,
equally important result of a manned lunar landing would be the creation of a
national capability to operate in space for purposes that might not be foreseeable.
Finally, Kennedy felt the need for the country to set aside “business as usual”
and commit itself with dedication and discipline to a goal that was both difficult
and worthwhile.
Kennedy had the assurance of those in the best position to know that it was
technologically possible to put a human on the moon within the decade. His
political advisers, while stressing the many benefits (including science) that
would accrue from a strong space program, recognized at once that humans were
the key. If the Soviets sent men and women to the moon, no American robot,
however sophisticated or important, would produce an equal impact on the
world’s consciousness. Hence America’s leadership in space would be asserted
by landing humans on the moon.
This line of reasoning was convincing enough for most congressional leaders,