:06:01
We put a man on the moon
as soon as possible.
:06:03
Just get him there.
:06:05
- We can keep sending supply ships...
- Until we figure a way to get him back!
:06:10
Well, that's...
:06:17
No, I'm sorry, gentlemen.
:06:20
There is no way on God's green Earth...
:06:22
we would ever...
:06:23
ever do anything like that.
:06:26
I'm sorry.
:06:33
It looked like either
Earth Orbit Rendezvous...
:06:35
or Direct Ascent
would be the way to go.
:06:37
Either way we go...
:06:39
the spacecraft that lands on the moon
is going to look like that.
:06:43
Yes, just like that.
:06:47
It doesn't have
to look like this at all.
:06:49
At Chance Vought Industries in Texas...
:06:51
an engineer named Tom Dolan
hit upon an interesting idea.
:06:54
You ever hear of a Russian rocket guy
named Yuri Kondratyuk?
:07:01
In 1916 he realized something
we seem to have forgotten today.
:07:04
Gettin' to the moon
is going to be all about weight.
:07:08
Look at the size of this thing.
It's gotta be 60-70 feet tall.
:07:12
A couple of hundred tons at least.
:07:14
Do you really need to take all that
to the surface? No.
:07:17
Kondratyuk wondered...
:07:19
What I wonder is...
:07:22
what if you took along
a smaller vehicle...
:07:25
lightweight...
:07:26
that you just used to land?
:07:31
Somethin'...
:07:34
like this.
:07:36
But you could never reenter
the Earth's atmosphere in that.
:07:38
I know. You come back
on the spacecraft you took from Earth.
:07:42
But that means you'd have to have
a rendezvous in lunar orbit.
:07:46
Exactly.
:07:48
Von Braun calls his method
Earth Orbit Rendezvous.
:07:50
I call this Lunar Orbit Rendezvous.
:07:52
Tom, we don't even know if
rendezvous is possible in Earth orbit.
:07:55
And you wanna do it around the moon?
:07:56
Wouldn't that be kind of dangerous?