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ch2-1.html
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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Chariots For Apollo, ch2-1</title>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<h2>May through December 1961</h2>
<p>
By the end of April 1961, NASA's three top executives - James Webb, Hugh
Dryden, and Robert Seamans - knew that Apollo would soon become an
approved project aimed at landing men on the moon. The agency's
engineers had done some thinking but little planning for that particular
step, which they viewed only as a possible objective for the 1970s. When
President Kennedy's challenge in late May abruptly made moon landing a
goal for the 1960s, adjustment within NASA to meet the new charge was
not an easy task. Although transfers from other agencies and a few
recently created offices had resulted in a relatively strong and
versatile organization, in May 1961 - and for months thereafter, for
that matter - NASA was not really prepared to direct an Apollo program
designed to fly its spacecraft around the moon. New and special
facilities would be needed and the aerospace industry would have to be
marshaled to develop vehicles not easily adapted to production lines,
even though no one had yet decided just what Apollo's component parts
should be or what they should look like.<p>
Despite all the committee and task group work done since NASA opened for
business, not one of the vehicles, from the ground up, was sufficiently
defined for an industrial contractor to develop and build. Because of
the time limitation imposed by Kennedy, Administrator Webb asked
Associate Administrator Seamans to get the pieces of Apollo that were
nearly defined under contract. With no appropriate project office to
implement this order, ad hoc committees and task groups still had to do
the work. For the remainder of 1961, until NASA could recruit enough
skilled people and organize them to carry out Apollo's mammoth
assignment, Seamans would continue to operate in this fashion.
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