: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?
:08:00
I don't know.
:08:02
Would it?
:08:04
Well, Mr. Dolan, this is certainly
a very interesting idea.
:08:08
Why don't you let us think about it.
:08:11
I've prepared a report.
:08:13
I have everything I need right here.
:08:16
Thank you for your time.
:08:21
Chances are, Lunar Orbit Rendezvous
would have ended up...
:08:24
as nothing more than a footnote
in the history of space exploration...
:08:28
if a report on the idea hadn't landed
on the desk of a NASA engineer...
:08:31
by the name of John Houbolt.
:08:33
When he first started reading
the report...
:08:35
Houbolt had the same reaction
others did:
:08:37
Lunar Orbit Rendezvous seemed like
just another farfetched scheme.
:08:41
But the more he read,
the more the idea made sense.
:08:45
By the time John Houbolt
finished the report...
:08:47
he knew this was it.
:08:50
This was how you get to the moon.
:08:56
Now, over the past few weeks
I've prepared this report...
:08:59
on Lunar Orbit Rendezvous.