Posted on February 19, 2015
In May 1961, NASA was not really prepared to direct an enormous Apollo program designed to fly its spacecraft to the moon. New and special facilities would be needed and the aerospace industry would have to be marshaled to develop vehicles not easily adapted to production lines, but at this point no one had even decided just what Apollo’s component parts should be or how they should look.
David G. Hoag, technical design director at the laboratory, examines the inertial measuring unit that would measure changes in Apollo spacecraft velocity when propulsion systems were fired
MIT Instrumentation Laboratory Director C. Stark Draper inspects a mockup of the Apollo guidance and control system in the September 1963
astronaut positions