Silverstein Committee
[1] The committee was chaired by Abe Silverstein, a long-time NASA engineer, with the express intent of selecting upper stages for the Saturn after a disagreement broke out between the Air Force and Army over its development.
The advantages of using new uppers were so great that the committee won over an initially skeptical von Braun, and the future of the Saturn program changed forever.
Other teams within the Air Force were also developing the Space Launcher System concept, which combined the same Titan II with a number of solid fuel rockets as a "zeroth stage".
To meet the same DoD requirement for a heavy space launcher, the Army team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) under the direction of a team led by Wernher von Braun studied a number of designs that clustered existing missile airframes and optionally added new engines.
Like the Air Force team, ABMA also outlined their vision of a crewed lunar mission as Project Horizon, using fifteen of these rockets to build a large vehicle in Earth orbit.
The newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was put in charge of development of the launcher, sided with the ABMA design.
Originally known as Super-Jupiter, the design became the Juno V during development, and on February 3 an ARPA memorandum officially renamed the project Saturn.
Shortly thereafter, on 9 June 1959, Herbert York, Director of the Department of Defense Research and Engineering, announced that he had decided to terminate the Saturn program.
The request was for the group to formulate recommendations for the development of the Saturn rocket, specifically concerning selection of the upper stage configurations.
A meeting of all involved parties was arranged under the direction of Abe Silverstein, whose earlier efforts were instrumental in Saturn being selected for NASA missions.
Since it was the power-to-weight ratio that they needed, upper stages based on liquid hydrogen seemed to be the only way forward – the light weight of the fuel makes up for any difficulty handling it.
Though the class "A" vehicles would have had the earliest flight availability due to the utilization of existing hardware, they failed to meet the first two mission for the Saturn rocket.
von Braun was won over; development of the current design would continue as a back-up, but the future of the Saturn was based on hydrogen and was tailored solely to NASA's requirements.
Development of the Titan continued for these roles, and as a result the flexibility offered by the variety of Saturn C-model intermediate stages simply wasn't needed, and were eventually abandoned.
People generally assume that C stood for configuration; but according to Kennedy Space Center's Spaceport News (17 January 1963), MSFC engineers used it to designate vehicular "concepts."
For additional information on the origins of Saturn, see John L. Sloop, Liquid Hydrogen as a Propulsion Fuel, 1945-1959, NASA SP-4404, in press, chap.
