page_title: Earth orbit rendezvous
section_title: Apollo
hierarchical_section_title: Earth orbit rendezvous / Apollo
caption_attribution_description: English: Original caption: Three days before President Kennedy's lunar commitment, John D. Bird, "Jaybird" (left), captured Langley's enthusiasm for a moonshot in his sketch "TO THE MOON WITH C-1's OR BUST" (below). In essence, his plan called for a mission via earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR) requiring the launch of 10 C-1 rockets.
context_page_description: Earth orbit rendezvous is a potential methodology for conducting round trip human flights to the Moon, involving the use of space rendezvous to assemble, and possibly fuel, components of a translunar vehicle in low Earth orbit. It was considered and ultimately rejected in favor of lunar orbit rendezvous for NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s, mainly because LOR does not require a spacecraft big enough to both make the return trip from Earth orbit to splashdown in the ocean, and a soft landing on the lunar surface. Three decades later, it was planned to be used for Project Constellation, until that program's cancellation in October 2010.
context_section_description: The EOR proposal for Apollo consisted of using a series of small rockets half the size of a Saturn V to put different components of a spacecraft to go to the Moon in orbit around the Earth, then assemble them in orbit.  Experiments of Project Gemini involving docking with the Agena target vehicle were designed partly to test the feasibility of this program.
  In the end, NASA employed the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous for the Apollo Program: a  Saturn V would simultaneously lift both the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules into low Earth orbit, and then the Saturn V third stage would fire again (Trans-lunar injection) to send both spacecraft to the Moon.
caption: 1961 sketch showing 10 C-1 launches required to assemble in Earth orbit an Apollo lunar landing mission.
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