Feb 7, 2009
Posted by Ray Katz in NASA, history
Historic footnote: He named our moon program.
There were no Jewish Apollo astronauts. But the Apollo program itself was named by Abe Silverstein, an engineer who died in 1991. Where did he get the name?
According to his obituary in the New York Times: “No specific reason for it. It was just an attractive name.”
Mr. Silverstein also named the country’s first manned space program, Mercury. And he directed the development the Centaur launch vehicle, which was used to send probes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The NASA’s next moon program, project Constellation, was (for a time) headed by a Jewish ex-astronaut Scott Horowitz.
