Apollo spacecraft feasibility study
Various NASA plans for a successor to Project Mercury / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Apollo spacecraft feasibility study?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
The Apollo spacecraft feasibility study was conducted by NASA from July 1960 through May 1961 to investigate preliminary designs for a post-Project Mercury multi-crewed spacecraft to be used for possible space station, circum-lunar, lunar orbital, or crewed lunar landing missions. Six-month, $250,000 study contracts were awarded to General Dynamics/Convair, General Electric, and the Glenn L. Martin Company. Meanwhile, NASA conducted its own inhouse design study led by Maxime Faget, intended as a gauge of the competitors' entries. The three companies spent varying amounts of their own money in excess of the $250,000 to produce designs which included a re-entry module separate from the mission module cabin, and a propulsion and equipment module.
One week after the presentation of the contractors' designs, President John F. Kennedy committed NASA to a crewed lunar landing, giving the Apollo program an immediate, critical focus. NASA decided to discard the study designs and the mission module cabin, and based the lunar landing mission design on Faget's inhouse design, with a cone-shaped command module, supported by a cylindrical service module containing return propulsion and supporting equipment. This would be carried to the lunar surface by a still-to-be-defined landing propulsion module. NASA then launched another competition for the command/service module procurement contract.
In December 1961, GE publicly presented their feasibility study design to the American Astronautical Society . Similarities in the basic mission-command-propulsion module design have been noted to the Soviet Union's Soyuz spacecraft designed by Sergei Korolev and Vasily Mishin. It has been speculated that Korolev and Mishin could have incorporated GE design elements in the existing OKB-1 Sever designs (1959-1962) [1] that eventually became the cancelled Soyuz-A (7K) (1963) and approved Soyuz 7K-OK (1965-1967).[2][3]