John Houbolt

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John Cornelius Houbolt (b. 1919) is a retired space engineer. He is generally credited with having effectively promoted the lunar mission mode called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR. This flight path first endorsed by Wernher von Braun in June 1961 and was chosen for Project Apollo in early 1962. This critical decision was viewed as vital to ensuring that Man reached the Moon in the 1960's, as President John F. Kennedy had proposed and, in the process, saved billions of dollars and time by efficiently using existing rocket technology.

Although the basics of the LOR concept had been expressed as early as 1923 by German rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, no one had recognized the fundamental significance of LOR until just a few years before Kennedy's announcement. Some engineers were adverse to the maneuver being done in lunar orbit, where there would be no fallback options in case of a major mishap. Houbolt had presented a paper in April 1960 about "soft rendezvous" in space, although not specifically lunar orbit.

Houbolt was an engineer at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and he was one of the most vocal of a minority of engineers who supported LOR and his campaign in 1961 and 1962. Once this mode was chosen in 1962, many other aspects of the mission were signifincantly based on this fundamental design decision.

While some aspects of Houbolt's initial proposal were not realistic (such as a 10,000 pound LEM which was ultimately 30,000 pounds), it proved to provide a package that could be achieved with a single Saturn V rocket whereas other modes would have required two or more such rocket launches (or larger rockets than were then available) to lift enough mass into space to complete the mission.

Houbolt's spent part of his childhood in in Joliet, Illinois. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning a Bachelors (1940) and a Masters (1942) degree in civil engineering. He later received a PhD in Technical Sciences in 1957 from ETH Zurich.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate, awarded on May 15, 2005 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.