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The young man who had licked BMEWS was a natural to tackle the moon. But at RCA, Holmes was making about $50,000 a year, plus the liberal fringe benefits (expense account,, stock options) with which successful corporations beguile high-bracket help. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration could offer him full command of all U.S. manned space flight, including Jack Kennedy's promised voyage to the moon−and a salary deeply cut to $21,000 a year.
Unknown Perils. Says his friend Eugene F. O'Neill, boss of Bell Laboratories' Telstar program: "Here he had this incredible project dropped in his lap. It was like being asked to navigate for Christopher Columbus. He kept asking how he could live with himself if he turned it down. In the end, it was his desire to push back the boundaries that prevailed. He has a streak of romanticism, religion, patriotism. He is not the cold, calculating type." So Brainerd Holmes sold his Moorestown, N.J., home, moved his family (wife and two teen-age daughters, Dorothy, 17, Katherine, 13) to a modest house in Washington.
The prospect was not wholly reassuring. Making a manned voyage to the moon and back is far more difficult than cartoonists, space fictioneers, or even most engineers think. It is more hazardous than the six-orbit Mercury mission scheduled for this summer. It involves almost every science known to man−including microbiology, astrophysics, and the farthest-out varieties of chemistry. It demands massive knowledge in such fields as lunar geology, as yet practically unexplored. The project is full of unknowns, threatened with unimagined perils, and it calls for money in war-sized chunks. Before the first American flies to the moon, Brainerd Holmes will have to spend at least $20 billion. The tab may mount, without surprising anyone, to $40 billion or more.
BUILDING BIGGER BOOSTERS
Catching up with the Soviets in booster rockets was the first problem. There has been heartening progress. Besides the none-too-reliable military Atlases that put the first Mercury astronauts in their orbits, the U.S. now has the Air Force Titan II, which is just starting its tests but is already considered a very reliable bird. Its structure is stiffer than the thin-skinned Atlas, and its two stages have thrust enough (430,000 Ibs. and 100,000 Ibs.) to make the next big advance in space, orbiting the two-man Gemini capsule around the earth.
An even bigger booster, the Saturn C1, is not a military weapon at all but an integral part of the Apollo man-on-the-moon project. Developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala., its first stage is largely the creation of famed Wernher von Braun, who designed V-2 rockets for the Nazis in World War II. With eight H-1 (Atlas) engines bound together to produce 1,500,000 Ibs. of thrust, the Saturn C-1 has been test-flown twice from Cape Canaveral, and it worked perfectly each time. The future star of the Apollo Project, the Advanced Saturn (C5) has yet to take final shape, but its most critical segment, the great F-1 engine developed by North American Aviation, Inc., is familiar to thousands of startled Californians as the loudest inhabitant of their state. The