NASA began work on a project (later named Surveyor) to send a soft-landing spacecraft to the moon to provide scientific and engineering data on the lunar surface.
NASA held its first NASA-Industry Program Plans Conference in Washington to brief industrial management on the overall space program. George M. Low, chief of NASA's Manned Space Flight program, stated that circumlunar flight and earth-orbiting missions would be carried out before 1970, leading eventually to a manned lunar landing and a permanent space station in earth orbit.
STG proposed to organize a number of Technical Liaison Groups to coordinate the activities of NASA centers in research for Apollo.
The United States launched its first human into space, Lt. Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard, Jr., who rode a Mercury spacecraft (Freedom 7) on a parabolic flight path 116.5 miles high and landed 320 miles down range.
Final reports of the six-month feasibility studies for advanced manned spacecraft were submitted to STG by the three contractors.
President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress on "urgent national needs," which included new long-range goals for the American space program. Kennedy expressed his belief that the nation should adopt the goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." He requested additional appropriations of $611 million for NASA and DoD for fiscal 1962.
NASA appointed a committee (Lundin committee) to study all possible approaches for accomplishing a manned lunar landing in the period 1967-1970 and to make rough estimates of costs and schedules.
MSC's Space Environment Division recommended 10 specific areas on the moon for evaluation as landing sites for Apollo. These sites and others would be photographed by Lunar Orbiter, after which some would be selected as targets for Surveyor, a project to land unmanned spacecraft on the moon and study the surface.
President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that NASA's Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral (Atlantic Missile Range) would be designated the John F. Kennedy Space Center.
Ranger VII returned the first close-up television pictures of the lunar surface, showing details as small as 1 meter across.
The NASA Administrator and the Surgeon General agreed to form an Interagency Committee on Back Contamination to define requirements for biological isolation and testing of material returned from the moon and to advise on the construction and operation of a quarantine facility for samples and astronauts.
The Space Science Board convened a Summer Study at Woods Hole, Mass., to recommend directions for future space research. The agenda included manned exploration of the moon and planets. Conferees drew up a list of 15 questions that should determine the course of lunar research. Following the Woods Hole sessions, another group met at Falmouth, Mass., to formulate specific recommendations for the Apollo and related unmanned projects.
The first Apollo spacecraft, a test version of the command and service module, was launched from Cape Canaveral on a two-stage Saturn 1-B rocket.
NASA Headquarters selected the Bendix Corporation to build the lunar surface experiments package.
A flash fire in Apollo command module 012 during preflight simulations at Cape Canaveral killed all three of the astronauts inside. Investigation of the cause of this tragedy by NASA and by Congress revealed serious shortcomings in the design of the spacecraft and management of manufacturing, testing, and manned simulations. Progress in the lunar landing program was drastically slowed; it was later estimated that the fire delayed the first lunar landing by 18 months.
Eleven scientists were selected for astronaut training, bringing the total number of scientist-astronauts to 15.
Wilmot Hess convened a group of NASA and academic scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz to prepare more detailed plans for lunar exploration based on current expectations for lunar missions. At the end of the conference Hess named a Group for Lunar Exploration Planning to work continuously with MSC in defining the scientific aspects of Apollo missions.
NASA and the National Academy of Sciences worked to establish a center for research on lunar and planetary samples adjacent to the Manned Spacecraft Center. The center, to be managed by a consortium of universities, would be the organization through which interested researchers could gain access to the lunar materials for scientific work and would provide office space and other support for visiting scientists.
In view of problems in building the instruments and constraints appearing in mission planning, OMSF decided not to fly the lunar surface experiments package on the first lunar landing mission. Instead, a simplified set of instruments (a laser reflector and a passive seismometer) would be developed for the first mission and the more extensive set currently in development would be flown later.
An operational readiness inspection of the lunar receiving laboratory was conducted and numerous discrepancies were noted. A 10-day simulation of LRL operations similarly uncovered many shortcomings in equipment and procedures.
OMSF authorized the Marshall Space Flight Center to proceed with development of a manned lunar roving vehicle capable of carrying two astronauts several kilometers from their landed lunar module. The vehicle would be used on the later Apollo exploration missions.
Detailed reports on the analysis of samples from Apollo 11 were presented at a Lunar Science Conference in Houston, the first of a series of annual conferences on lunar (and later planetary) science.
Budget restrictions and the need to get on with post-Apollo development forced NASA to cancel Apollo 20 and stretch out the remaining seven missions to six-month intervals.