NASA engineer vital to moon landing dies

[Don Shepherd]

John Houbolt, the engineer at NASA who suggested the method to land men on the moon, died last week. He had the idea to have the connected command module and lunar module go into lunar orbit and then separate, with only the lightweight lunar module landing on the moon. He wrote a letter in 1961 suggesting this method to the incoming NASA administrator, bypassing the traditional chain-of-command.

Let's hope we continue to have visionaries like him in the future.