John C. Houbolt

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John C. Houbolt (1962)

John Cornelius Houbolt (born April 10, 1919 in Altoona , Iowa , † April 15, 2014 in Scarborough (Maine) ) was an American aircraft engineer. He is considered the main proponent of the method of using an independent lunar module for the moon landing . This requires a rendezvous in a lunar orbit ( Lunar Orbit Rendezvous , LOR ), which was considered too complex by many participants at the time. The LOR concept favored by Houbolt, a complex but optimized configuration of separate spacecraft, became a groundbreaking key decision for the moon landings of the Apollo program. This not only made it possible to get by with a single rocket, but also allowed the individual components to be optimized for their precise purpose.

Life

His parents, Henrika, geb. Van Ingen and John Herman Houbolt were farmers and moved to a farm in Joliet, Illinois in 1925. In addition to farm work, John Cornelius was also involved in building model airplanes.

Houbolt studied civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . He was a member of Tau Beta Pi, Chi Epsilon, Phi Kappa Phi and Sigma Xi. During his studies he designed department stores, streets for the neighboring town of Waukegan and railroad bridges for the Illinois Central Railroad .

After earning his master's degree in 1942 , he started at the NACA's Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, doing research on the stability and dynamics of aircraft structures. Between 1945 and 1963 he taught at the University of Virginia . When he served as an exchange scientist in the British Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough for six months in 1949 , he married his colleague Mary Morris on June 14, 1949, with whom he had three daughters.

He then became Associate Chief of the Dynamic Loads Division at the LaRC, doing research on elasticity problems in aircraft and spacecraft. 1956/57 he graduated from the ETH Zurich his Ph.D. in Technical Sciences with the thesis "A Study of several aerothermoelastic problems of aircraft structures in high-speed flight". In 1961 he became head of the Theoretical Mechanics Division at LaRC and researched special problems in space flight, such as rendezvous , communication satellites and the dynamics of launch vehicles .

After the Sputnik shock in 1957, three concepts remained from various considerations about the flight to the moon at the end of the 1950s: The Nova rocket the size of a battleship according to Max Faget (which lands on the moon with a step the size of a six-story house should), the Earth Orbit Rendezvous based on an idea by Wernher von Braun (in which the lunar spaceship was to be assembled in Earth orbit) and the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR concept). In the event of a feared accident, they wanted to have the astronauts as close as possible.

The Russian mechanic Juri Kondratjuk had an idea for a rendezvous in a lunar orbit as early as 1917, which Hermann Oberth took up again in 1929 and was refined in 1948 by member of the British Interplanetary Society Harry E. Ross . Houbolt was enthusiastic about the idea, but it was initially a minority opinion. When the LaRC came up with the question of which method the manned moon landing should be used, he defended it against all odds and without regard to the hierarchies of NASA. With a letter in November 1961 to the deputy head of NASA, Robert Seamans , he was able to enforce it.

From 1963 to 1975 he was Senior Vice President and Senior Consultant with the Aeronautical Research Associates of Princeton, Inc. He then returned to LaRC as Chief Aeronautical Scientist until his retirement in 1985 . From around 1983 he lived in Williamsburg (Virginia) and in 2001 he founded his company in Scarborough (Maine), near Portland. He died in 2014 at the age of 95 in a nursing home in Scarborough, Maine.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Mondlande engineer Houbolt died at the age of 95
  2. ↑ Neal Houbolt Obituary ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) also Hendreika
  3. ↑ Barbara Apostolacus Speais.s for Seniors 2
  4. ↑ NASA authorization for fiscal year 1960 (1959), p. 554 (consequently born in Des Moines , Iowa)
  5. ↑ Allen G. Debus: World Who's Who in Science (1968); P. 831
  6. ^ John Cornelius Houbolt: A Study of several aerothermoelastic problems of aircraft structures in high-speed flight . 1958, doi : 10.3929 / ethz-a-000099619 ( handle.net [accessed on July 18, 2019] ETH Zurich).
  7. ↑ Jason Richie: Space Flight: Crossing the Last Frontier ; P. 65f
  8. ↑ Enchanted Rendezvous pp. 59-67
  9. ↑ John C Houbolt ( Memento from April 21, 2014 in the web archive archive.today )
personal data
SURNAME Houbolt, John C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Houbolt, John Cornelius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American aircraft engineer
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Altoona , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 2014
Place of death Scarborough (Maine)