North American Aviation awarded $2.4 billion crew and service module contract: read how Flight reported that 1961 win

Find below links to pdf pages from Flight International's 7 December 1961 issue. In the former missiles and spaceflight section of the magazine Flight reported on the 28 November award to North American Aviation (NAA) of the $400 million contract for the command and service modules that would carry the 27 Moon mission astronauts during the nine lunar missions from 1968 to 1972. NAA was bought by Rockwell in 1967 and in turn that company would be bought by Boeing in 1997.

Above: Apollo 14 command and service modules undergoing check-out and testing at Kennedy Space Centre, November 1969

Today the Apollo spacecraft contract would be worth around $2.4 billion. The 7 December issue of Flight also began a multi-edition feature article about US plans for manned spaceflight. Pdf pages two, three and four below are the first three pages of that feature from that issue. Flight, first published in December 1908, has covered the development of spaceflight since the very beginning. Check the Flight International archive for issues that covered the launch of Sputnik; the flights of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard; the later Vostock and Mercury missions; the lunar, Martian and Venusian robotic missions; the Apollo programme; the Apollo-Soyuz project; the Mir space stations; the development and maiden flight of the Space Shuttle and all the other significant spaceflight events over almost 50 years.

Click on the image, or the pdf page, links for the 1961 Missiles and Spaceflight section, or right click and save target to download.

Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4

 

 

Source: FlightGlobal.com