John Houbolt
John C. Houbolt (b. 1919) is a retired space engineer. He is generally credited with having effectively promotoed the the lunar mission mode called "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous" or LOR. This flight path first endorsed by Wernher von Braun in June 1961 and was chosen for Project Apollo in early 1962.
Houbolt was an engineer at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and he was one of the most vocal of a minority of engineers who supported LOR and his campaign in 1961 and 1962. Once this mode was chosen in 1962, many other aspects of the mission were signifincantly based on this fundamental design decision.
While some aspects of Houbolt's initial proposal were not realistic (such as a 10,000 pound LEM which was ultimately 30,000 pounds), it proved to provide a package that could be achieved with a signle Saturn V rocket whereas other modes would have required two or more such rocket launches (or larger rockets than were then avaiable) to lift enough mass into space to complete the mission.
Houbolt's spent part of his childhood in in Joliet, Illinois and he attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, earning his bachelor’s (1940) and master’s (1942) degrees in civil engineering at the U. of I. Although he later received a PhD in Technical Sciences in 1957 from ETH.
He was awarded an honorary doctorate, awarded on May 15, 2005 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.