Apollo Applications Program

The Apollo Applications Program (AAP) was established by NASA headquarters in 1968 to develop science-based manned space missions using hardware developed for the Apollo program. AAP was the ultimate development of a number of official and unofficial Apollo follow-on projects studied at various NASA labs.

Initially the AAP office in Washington was an offshoot of the Apollo "X" bureau, also known as the Apollo Extension Series. AES was developing technology concepts for mission proposals based on the Saturn IB and Saturn V boosters. These included a manned lunar base, an earth-orbiting space station, the so-called Grand Tour of the Outer Solar System, and the original "Voyager program" of Mars Lander probes.

The Apollo lunar base proposal saw an unmanned Saturn V used to land a shelter based on the Apollo Command/Service Module (CSM) on the Moon. A second Saturn V would carry a three-man crew and a modified CSM and Apollo Lunar Module (LM) to the Moon. The two-man excursion team would have a surface stay time of nearly 200 days and use of an advanced lunar rover and a lunar flier as well as logistics vehicles to construct a larger shelter. The isolation of the CSM pilot was a concern for mission planners, so proposals that it would be a three-man landing team or that the CSM would rendezvous with an orbiting module were considered.

The following phases were considered:

The Apollo LM Taxi was essentially the basic Apollo LM modified for extended lunar surface stays. This was expected to be the workhorse of both Apollo Applications Extended Lunar Surface Missions beginning in 1970 and to larger Lunar Exploration System for Apollo in the mid-to-late 1970s.

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