Todd Zwillich: The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon

Todd Zwillich, NPR’s Washington Correspondent and host on The Takeaway and 1A, crafted an audiobook telling the story of John C. Houbolt, an unsung hero of Apollo 11 and the man who showed NASA how to put America on the moon.

According to Zwillich (and many from NASA), without John C. Houbolt, a mid-level engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon.

Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth. It's the scenario used in 1950s cartoons and horror movies about traveling to outer space.

Houbolt had another idea: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR would link two spacecraft in orbit while the crafts were travelling at 3,600 miles an hour around the moon. His plan was ridiculed and considered unthinkable. But this junior engineer was irrepressible. He stood by his concept, fired off memos to executives, and argued that LOR was the only way to success.