Project Lodestar

Project Lodestar was the crewed lunar programme of the United States, which landed the first people on the Moon. On 3 June 1968 its first landing crew set down in Mare Imbrium, and Major Curtis Holloway became the first person to walk on the lunar surface. The programme made six landings, the last in 1972, and returned about 300 kg of lunar samples.

Lodestar was announced by President Dale Mercer in May 1961 and run by the United States Air Force from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The government of the period presented the landing as proof of the American system against the European Federation in the Kaltkrieg. The programme was ended on cost grounds in 1972, a year before the Federation's Somnium programme made its first landing.

Background

The European Federation launched the first artificial satellite, Kepler 1, in 1956, and put the first person into orbit, the Czechoslovak pilot Václav Kubeš, in 1960. The American Air Force had flown suborbital rockets from Cape Canaveral since 1950, and its first satellite reached orbit in 1957.

Mercer, president since 1958, announced a crewed landing on the Moon as a national goal in an address to Congress in May 1961, a year after the Federation's orbital flight. Project Lodestar was established the same year under the Air Force, which ran the American space programme, with an office of its own reporting directly to the president. Its budget peaked in 1965 at about 4% of federal spending. The programme cost about 23 billion dollars in all.

Its astronauts were drawn from Air Force and Navy test pilots. Under the federal racial laws of the period the corps was entirely white and entirely male.

Spacecraft

Lodestar crews were launched by the Lodestar booster, a three-stage rocket about 110 m tall, from a launch complex built for it on Merritt Island, beside Cape Canaveral. The spacecraft carried three crew: a command ship that remained in lunar orbit with one pilot, and a lander that took the other two to the surface and back. The command ship alone returned to Earth, landing in the Atlantic.

From 1971 the landers carried a crewed rover, which extended the area a crew could survey from a few hundred metres around the lander to several kilometres.

Missions

The first American in orbit flew in 1962, and Lodestar crews flew in Earth orbit from 1965, testing rendezvous, docking and the lander, and around the Moon in 1967. The first landing crew set down in Mare Imbrium on 3 June 1968. Holloway and his crewmate spent about 20 hours on the surface and collected 21 kg of samples.

All six landings were on the near side. Crews set up seismometers, heat-flow probes and laser reflectors at their sites, and the fifth and sixth crews used the rover.

End of the programme

President Mercer died in office in March 1971. His successor, Raymond Sowell, cancelled the four landings planned after 1972, on cost grounds, and no American crew returned to the Moon until 2016, when an Air Force crew landed near the south pole. The Air Force kept flying satellites and crewed missions in Earth orbit. The Federation's Somnium programme landed its first crew in Mare Tranquillitatis in 1973 and made the first landing on the far side in 1977.

Legacy

Lodestar's samples were the first material returned from the Moon. They are held by the Air Force and a group of American universities, and samples were exchanged with the Federation for the first time in 1983, after the end of the American Emergency.

The laser reflectors left at four of the six sites have been used since 1969 to measure the distance to the Moon to within a few centimetres. Observatories in the Federation and the United States have used them since 2028 to record the change in the Moon's orbit.

The American space programme was cut back after the outbreak of the Second World War in 2022, and its launch sites in Florida were lost with the coasts in 2027.

See also

• Moon
• Somnium programme
• Kaltkrieg