To "land a man on the moon" and "return him safely to the Earth" would require rockets larger than any ever flown. The obvious choice for the Apollo booster was the Saturn series, which was under development at Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama; the project's head and outspoken advocate was former Nazi missile designer Wernher von Braun.s scrapped before it got very far.

FVV (Facilities Verification Vehicle), a full-scale mockup of the Saturn V. (NASA)

The Saturn rockets underwent several design iterations. The greatest of these was the Saturn V, which would have the power to send men, and the machines carrying them, to the moon. A fully-loaded Saturn rocket, decked out with its supply of fuels and oxidizers, would have the explosive capacity of an atomic bomb should it happen to explode. If men were on board, they would be killed instantly.

A solution for this problem had been implemented on the Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas rockets. A tower superstructure was mounted above the spacecraft carrying the astronaut; on top of the tower was mounted a solid rocket motor with a high-impulse propellant. Should something adverse happen during the flight, the escape sequence would be tripped, putting into action an unstoppable chain of events. The rocket motor would fire, while all connections with the booster would be severed automatically. With a terrific acceleration, the rocket would hurl the spacecraft, and its crew, safely away from the doomed booster.

A similar system was implemented into the design of the Apollo command module, built by North American Aviation in Downey, California. The Lockheed Aircraft Corporation (headquartered in Burbank) built the escape motor. The entire stack of command module, tower superstructure, and escape motor was named the Apollo-LES, for Launch Escape System.

Nothing could be tested to fly with men aboard without being thoroughly tested on the ground beforehand. It was necessary to prove the design of the Apollo-LES in Earth's atmosphere...without wasting an expensive Saturn rocket on the test. Two sort of tests would be needed: static and dynamic.

The dynamic tests involved launching a boilerplate capsule into the sky with a rocket known as the Little Joe II, after the original Little Joe used for Mercury escape system tests. With the rocket on an upward course, the LES was fired to pluck the capsule away from the booster. This was a well-known segment of Apollo history, and a popular subject for scale modeling. (I even built a Little Joe II of my own; it first flew in 2003.)

One of the two surviving Little Joe II boosters, on static display in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The other tests, static, are a largely-forgotten piece of history. Instead of the Apollo capsules being fired off on a rocket vehicle, they were fired off of the ground. These were known as Pad-Abort tests.

Two such tests were conducted during the run of the Apollo program. PA-1 took place on November 7, 1963 (thirty-six years prior to the founding of the WAEC), and PA-2 was fired in 1965.

Pad-Abort 1. (NASA)

For the PA-1 launch at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, the National Geographic Society sent two photographers, Otis Imboden and James P. Blair, to the launch site to document the flight with Kodachromes. They took dramatic pictures of the capsule, Boilerplate #6, soaring aloft on orange smoke, coming down under three parachutes, and landing in the desert. The best of these pictures were included in the March, 1964 issue of National Geographic magazine.

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a physical copy of this issue at the 1999 Experimental Aircraft Association Flyin at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I snatched it up on the basis of the cover: an exciting painting by Davis Meltzer of a Gemini spacecraft hurtling above Earth with an astronaut spacewalking outside. (This was likely the first step in an obsession with collecting National Geographics; my collection now approaches 200.) Inside the magazine, among other things, was a fascinating article, "Footprints on the Moon," Dr. Hugh L. Dryden. The article was resplendent with artists' conceptions of key aspects of the Gemini and Apollo programs, along with plenty of photographs of retro-style space hardware. An interested individual could probably find it in the bound volumes of National Geographics in a local public library, or on the National Geographic CD collection. It is Issue 3 of Volume 125.

On Monday, February 21, 2000, I didn't have to go to school because of President's Day. Since it was the very depths of February, I was getting a little bored with my current situation, and I began occupying myself with strange activities like cleaning my room. After one such stave against the mess in my room on the aforementioned Monday, I sat down and looked through the aforementioned National Geographic. What really struck me, as it hadn't done before, were the pictures of the PA-1 launch, in full color. I thought, Now wouldn't that be an awesome subject for a model rocket?

That was the very first glimmer of a WAEC project that would span two years before the prototype would have its first flight, and encompass more than four years before I would at last declare the project complete.