Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

In 1952, a new idea was shown in spectacular full-color pictures in the Collier’s issue of March 22. A panel of scientists headed by Dr. Wernher von Braun told how a space station, a great spinning shining ring, filled with workshops and living quarters and observation posts, with artificial gravity, serviced by a fleet of space tugs, could be built within the next ten to fifteen years. Among other things, such as promoting world peace (“It would be the end of Iron Curtains wherever they might be”), the space station would be an intermediate step for getting to the moon. A spacecraft would be assembled in space, using components launched separately from earth. This new way of getting to the moon (minus the great spinning space station) would become known later as the earth-orbit rendezvous mode, or E.O.R.