What was the most important legacy of the Apollo missions of 40 years ago?
The program evolved from not having any space capability to landing on the Moon. We had the flexibility to make the judgment between a very large single rocket and two Saturn 5s, or two spacecraft and one Saturn 5 using the, at that time untried and unproven, lunar orbit rendezvous mode. I think that we can begin to look at lunar surface rendezvous as an additional way [to approach landing on the Moon], so that the ascent vehicle can be prepositioned on the surface and then the crew, when it lands with the descent vehicle, it can be much larger and carry a much larger payload because it doesn’t have to go back up into orbit. It can offload movable habitats as part of the descent stage. And then the descent engine, the rocket engines can be used to perhaps take back up into orbit some of the water or ice that can be processed into fuel in the vicinity of L1 [the gravitational midpoint between Earth and its moon]. Aside from the technological side of things, what do you think is the most
