Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

If it hadn’t been for John Houbolt, that might have been the end of it.* The Langley engineers on Brown’s team had done what Langley did best. They had explored an interesting research problem, prepared a technically careful discussion of it, and published the results in a Langley paper. If the practitioners cared to use their work, they were welcome to it. If not, that was their business. But by that time John Houbolt had gotten involved. [* Herein lies contention. In 1969, at the time of the first moon landing, Life magazine ran a long article that portrayed John Houbolt as both the creative force and lonely crusader for L.O.R. This was an exaggeration, perhaps customary in glossy magazines but scandalous to Langley engineers, who were always finicky about questions of scholarly attribution. Subsequently, Robert Gilruth was to become the leading proponent of an alternative interpretation of history, that Houbolt’s contribution really wasn’t that important—L.O.R. would have won on its engineering merits anyway. It is of course impossible to be sure what would have happened without Houbolt, but the text reflects our own reading of this history: Houbolt was not the originator of the L.O.R. concept (nor did he claim to be), but his advocacy was crucial, probably decisive, in leading to the adoption of L.O.R. There is a fascinating doctoral dissertation yet to be written on this episode, however.]