Vice President Johnson presented his report to Kennedy detailing what the US had to do to beat the Russians five days after Shepard’s flight, calling for an acceleration of US efforts to explore space – the phrase was ‘to pursue projects aimed at enhancing national prestige’. Then came Kennedy’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961: ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.’ Kennedy’s speech was not widely reported in the Soviet media; few in their space program took any notice.

Shepard made the following analysis of it:

The plan was now coming together. Certain aspects of the spacecraft design were already well advanced, although others would depend on the mission profile, which was yet to be confirmed. There were questions surrounding the rocket that was going to launch Apollo. As a result of numerous studies, the large rocket originally proposed by von Braun was not considered feasible so the Huntsville engineers had to scale down their ambitions. They eventually focused on a design involving five huge F-1 rocket motors on the first stage and a new hydrogen-oxygen motor for the upper stages. Calculations showed it could easily send more than 40 tons to the Moon. This was the Saturn 5.

To develop and manufacture the large Saturn stage a new plant was built at Seal Beach in California, where North American Aviation was to build major parts of the rocket. Some development and manufacture was moved into a new Douglas Center at Huntington Beach, also in California, while static testing, involving firing the rocket while held down, was carried out in Sacramento. The Marshall Center in Huntsville was also enlarged. A huge new building was erected for assembly of the first three first stages. A large stand was built to static-test the full thrust of the Saturn’s five F-1 engines, which generated a staggering 180 million horsepower.

But how do you get to the Moon? What combination of rockets, docking and landers do you need? Most came to feel that lunar-orbit rendezvous was the best way to carry out the mission. With lunar-orbit rendezvous the lander leaves the mother ship in lunar orbit and goes down to the surface. Upon returning to lunar orbit, it links up with the mother ship and the astronauts transfer to it and return to Earth. It was first proposed by John Houbolt, chairman of the group that studied this plan at the Langley Research Center. It required far less mass being sent to the Moon and needed one spacecraft designed specifically for lunar landing and take-off, while the other could be designed for flying to and from the Moon and specifically for re-entry and Earth landing. If the lunar-orbit rendezvous technique was used then only one Saturn 5 launch would be needed for each Moon mission.

However, Brainerd Holmes who led Apollo in Washington was not a fan of this mission profile. He preferred Earth-orbit rendezvous, even though this would mean a dual launching of the Saturn 5 per mission, each launch carrying different spacecraft components prior to their joining together in orbit. Fuel would be pumped from one to refill the other before realigning and igniting the rocket to the Moon. Although this way much larger payloads could be flown to the Moon than by a single rocket, it was complicated and risky and would probably require years to get over the technical and operational problems, thus missing the end-of-the-decade deadline.

By late 1961 the team at the new Manned Spacecraft Center were unified in support of lunar-orbit rendezvous and were investigating lunar lander design. In December of 1961 they appealed to Brainerd Holmes to approve lunar-orbit rendezvous but he was still not convinced, delaying the inevitable approval by many months. James Webb approved the lunarorbit plan and although a few of the President’s science advisors were unconvinced, the White House accepted Webb’s decision. One of the NASA officials went up to Houbolt at a meeting and asked to shake the hand of the man who had saved the American taxpayer $20 billion.

So now it was known what vehicles were required. They would come to be known as the Command and Service Module, and the Lunar Module. The Apollo Command and Service Module – the CSM – was a single spacecraft, but separable into two components. The Command Module was compact and solid designed to survive the heat of re-entry after it jettisoned the Service Module and slammed into the atmosphere at 40,000 km an hour. The speed of re-entry from the Moon is nearly one and a half times as fast as returning from Earth orbit; to slow down from that speed required the dissipation of great amounts of energy. The Command Module was cone-shaped, with a blunt face for re-entry; it was 3.35 m long, 3.96 m in diameter, and weighed 6 tons.

The Service Module was the quartermaster carrying most of the stores needed for the journey: oxygen, power-generation equipment, and water as a by-product of power generation. More than that, it had a propulsion system bigger and more powerful than many upper stages of present rockets. It made all the manoeuvres needed to navigate to the Moon, to push itself and the Lunar Module into lunar orbit, and to eject itself out of orbit for the return to Earth. It was a cylinder the same diameter as the CM and 7.3 m long. Fully loaded it weighed 26 tons.

Then there was the Lunar Module, LM, pronounced ‘lem’ (the original abbreviation was LEM, until the word ‘excursion’ was dropped from the name). It only had to operate in space so its walls were flimsy and it had spindly legs. Its mission was to carry two explorers from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon, and then send its upper half back into lunar orbit to rendezvous with the CSM. It was 7 m tall and weighed 16 tons. When Jim McDivitt returned from Apollo 9, its first manned flight, he said, ‘It sure flies better than it looks.’

So these were the Apollo spacecraft: two machines, 17 tons of aluminium, steel, copper, titanium, and synthetic materials; 100,000 drawings, 26 subsystems, 678 switches, 410 circuit breakers, 65 km of wire and 33 tons of propellant.

The CSM’s life-support system had remarkable efficiency and reliability. A scuba diver uses a tank of air in about 60 minutes. In Apollo it would last 15 hours. Exhaled oxygen was scrubbed to eliminate its carbon dioxide, had its moisture removed, and was reused continually. The same system kept the cabin at the right pressure, provided hot and cold water, and ran a coolant system.

Electrical power for the CM came from fuel cells and for the LM from batteries. Fuel cells used oxygen and hydrogen held as liquids at extremely cold temperatures. When combined chemically this yielded electric power and water. Storing oxygen and hydrogen required new insulated containers. It was calculated that if the Apollo hydrogen tank were filled with ice and placed in a room at 20°C, it would take eight and a half years for the ice to melt. If an automobile tyre leaked at the same rate as these tanks, it would take 30 million years to go flat.

There were 50 rocket engines on the spacecraft: sixteen on the LM, sixteen on the SM, and twelve on the CM, used to orient the craft in any desired direction. Three of the engines were much larger. All three had to work: a failure would have stranded astronauts on the Moon or in lunar orbit. So the engineers made them so simple they said that they couldn’t fail.

The next thing to do was to decide where to build the moon-port. It had to be a place from which the huge rockets could be assembled and launched. The usual launch facility, Cape Canaveral, with its 7,000 hectares, wasn’t large enough. Sites were considered in Hawaii, on the California coast, Cumberland Island off Georgia, Mayaguana Island in the Bahamas, Padre Island off the coast of Texas, and several others. The most advantageous site was Merritt Island, right next to the Air Force’s Cape Canaveral facilities, which had been launching missiles since 1950 and NASA rockets since 1958. The site recommendation was completed July 1961. Rocco Petrone, a brilliant engineer, was in charge of the construction, having come to NASA via the Army and the Redstone rocket program. Later he would be in charge of Apollo. He spent all night printing the recommendation, and flew to Washington with Kurt Debus to brief James Webb. Debus was one of von Braun’s original team. Soon 34,000 hectares of sand and scrub were acquired for NASA by the government, plus 23,000 hectares of submerged land, at a total cost of $71,872,000. Then came the construction crews, who by 1965 numbered 7,000.

At one time NASA considered preparing the Moon rocket horizontally, and then erecting it vertically on the pad as the Russians did with their considerably smaller rockets. But this would not work for such a big rocket: the Saturn 5 was to be assembled stage by stage. Weather considerations meant that an enclosed building would be essential. Even a 10- to 15-knot wind would have made outdoor assembly very difficult, and higher winds could prove disastrous. Out of these considerations came the Vertical Assembly Building, or VAB. One of the legends had it that the crane operator who set the 40-ton second stage on top of the first stage had to qualify for the job by lowering a similar weight until it touched a raw egg without cracking the shell!

But how to get the stacked Saturn 5 from the VAB to the launch pad? Early in the program it was considered moving it on its 6-km journey by water. The barge concept was familiar as the first and second stages had to come to the Cape by barge, from Louisiana and California. For this short trip why not also float the Saturn 5 and its Mobile Launcher standing upright on a barge? To see if it was feasible the Navy ran tests – which showed that it wasn’t. Then engineers considered a rail system, but that was also impractical. Eventually somebody came up with the idea of using giant tracked machines like those used in strip mining. The crawler was built by the Marion Power Shovel Company, and had eight tracks, each 2 by 12.5 m, with cleats like a Sherman tank, except that each cleat weighed a ton. Mounted over these eight tracks was the platform, bigger than a baseball diamond, on which the Apollo-Saturn 5 and its Mobile Launcher would ride from VAB to pad at one mile per hour. The whole package weighed 9,000 tons, two-thirds cargo, one-third crawler.

To keep the giant rocket balanced the crawler required a levelling system that would keep it to within one degree of absolute vertical. The sensing system depended on two manometers, each 40 m long, extending like an X from corner to corner under the platform; if they showed the deck was out of level by even half an inch, it was corrected by hydraulically raising or lowering one or more of the corners. Adjustments were made many times during the trip from the VAB, especially as the crawler climbed the five-degree incline leading up to the pad.

The pads of Complex 39 became to Moon exploration what Palos was to Columbus. Pad A and Pad B were twins, each occupying about 160 acres; a Pad C had also been planned, which explains why the crawler-way from A to B had an elbowlike crook in it – the elbow would have led to Pad C. The pads were over 2 km apart so that an explosion on one would not wreck the other.

James Webb now had all the pieces in place: the Saturn 5, a Command Module for three astronauts, designed for re-entry; and a separate Service Module with a large rocket motor, attitude control jets, and fuel cells for electric power, together with fuel and oxygen. The LM would land on the Moon carrying two men to the surface and back to rendezvous with the mother ship in orbit. It was a tremendous achievement for Webb and NASA as it had been developed within one year of Kennedy’s announcement. Grumman had won the contract to build the lunar lander, while North American Aviation would build the CSM.

What was needed now was a program that sat between Mercury and Apollo so that astronauts could develop the techniques needed for Apollo. This would require a spacecraft carrying an on-board propulsion system for manoeuvring, a guidance and navigation system, a radar and a controlled reentry system. The resultant two-man Gemini spacecraft was larger than Mercury but small by Apollo standards, but the Titan II launch vehicle – the best available at that time – could not manage a larger payload.

Two months after Shepard’s flight, Gus Grissom performed a similar mission in the ‘Liberty Bell 7’ Mercury capsule. It was straightforward, except that when he splashed down the explosive bolts on the hatch blew prematurely. There is speculation that he had accidently armed them when his elbow pressed against a switch. Grissom had to make a quick exit as Liberty Bell 7 started to sink. As he had not sealed the hose connection on his suit, it started to fill with water. The capsule was tethered to the rescue helicopter and was getting heavier. A warning light in the helicopter came on, indicating it was about to flounder. The pilot ejected the capsule, which sank thousands of metres to the sea bed. It was later discovered that the warning light was a false alarm and they could have rescued the capsule. It remained at the bottom of the Atlantic for 38 years before it was retrieved. It is now on display in the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. There were no clues as to why the hatch blew.

Back in the USSR, although there were orders for the manufacture of more Vostok spacecraft, detailed plans for future missions were rather vague. Unlike the United States, which had a specific series of missions and goals as part of its Mercury project, the Soviet effort was to move forward in a rather haphazard way. It was to be their undoing. Plans for the second piloted Vostok flight focused on a day-long mission.

Titov, Gagarin’s backup for the first mission, was chosen for the flight. For Titov’s backup, the most likely candidate would have been Nelyubov, but Titov had been irritated by his outspoken attitude so he was dropped and Nikolayev became the back up. Three months after Gagarin’s flight, Khrushchev invited Korolev and a number of other prominent space figures to meet with him on a vacation in Crimea. Korolev said that a second Vostok mission was in preparation. Khrushchev added that the launch should occur no later than 10 August. Later the reason became clear – the building of the Berlin Wall began on 13 August. Khrushchev had wanted to give the socialist world a morale boost during such a tense time.

As the launch date approached there was some trepidation because of higher than usual radiation resulting from intense solar activity, but this declined sufficiently in time for the launch. On the morning of 6 August Titov blasted off. This time the booster worked as expected but when Titov entered orbit he was not well. He felt as if he was flying upside down and in a ‘strange fog’, unable to read the instrument panel. On the second orbit he felt worse and thought of asking that the flight be curtailed. He tried eating a little but vomited. He carried out an experiment, manually firing the attitude control jets, but although it went well he still felt terrible, only slightly better than on previous orbits.

‘Now I’m going to lie down and sleep,’ he said. ‘You can think what you want, but I’m going to sleep.’ Flight rules said he had to keep his helmet on when sleeping but he felt that he could choke if he vomited. He rigged a piece of string to jerk open the visor in case of an emergency while sleeping. He overslept by about 30 minutes, waking on his twelfth orbit, at the end of which he began to improve. When it came to re-entry, as with Gagarin’s mission, the instrument section remained attached to the spherical descent capsule. Eventually Titov ejected after a record flight of one day, one hour and eleven minutes.

As Cosmonaut number 2 recovered from his flight, Cosmonaut number 1 was having a spot of trouble. It seems that the trials of dealing with instant fame caught up with him and he was disciplined at a Communist Party meeting on 14 November for ‘acknowledged cases of excessive drinking, loose behaviour towards women, and other offences’. In what seems to have been a case of womanizing, in mid-October, Gagarin jumped out of a window of a young woman’s room at a resort when his wife came knocking. He sustained a severe injury to his forehead, which left him in hospital for a while. All photos of the cosmonaut past that point show a deep scar over his left eye. Gagarin later explained to the Soviet press that he had fallen down while playing with his daughter, adding, ‘it will heal, before my next space flight.’ But there was never to be a next flight for him.

In November, NASA fished chimpanzee Enos from the Atlantic after he had made the second orbital test of the Mercury capsule. The third sub-orbital Redstone flight was cancelled; instead, the next one would be the more powerful Atlas booster, which would take John Glenn into orbit.

The Space Task Group was expanded into a full NASA Center and tasked with developing the spacecraft, astronaut training, and flight operations. Robert Gilruth became head of it in Houston. It was temporarily housed in about 50 rented buildings while the new Center was being designed and built. Gilruth said, ‘It was a period of growth, organization, and growing pains. We were establishing new contractor relations, moving families and acquiring new homes, as well as conducting the orbital flights of Project Mercury.’

For the Soviet Union their future plans depended upon Korolev’s unwritten rule that each mission be a significant advance over the previous one. A month after Titov’s troubled flight, Korolev proposed a dramatic mission: three Vostok spacecraft, each with a single cosmonaut, launched on three successive days. The first pilot would conduct a three-day mission while the two others would be in space for two to three days. There would be one day when all three spacecraft would be in space. But others were not convinced and Korolev was forced to reduce the plan to two Vostok craft, to be launched by January 1962 at the earliest.

Publicity surrounding John Glenn’s imminent launch did not go unnoticed in the USSR. Military-Industrial Commission Chairman Ustinov called Korolev on 7 February, just days before Glenn’s flight, and ordered the dual Vostok launch in mid-March. In his diary, Kamanin commented on the stupidity of making decisions in such a way: ‘This is the style of our leadership. They’ve been doing nothing for almost half a year and now they ask us to prepare an extremely complex mission in just ten days’ time. The program of which has not even been agreed upon.’ Fortunately a rocket failure at Baikonur forced a much-needed delay to the dual Vostok mission.