 When Shea was hired by NASA, President John F. Kennedy's commitment to landing men on the Moon was still only seven months old, and many of the major decisions that shaped the Apollo program were yet to be made.Foremost among these was the mode that NASA would use to land on the Moon.When Shea first began to consider the issue in 1962, most NASA engineers and managersincluding Wernher von Braun, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Centerfavored either an approach called direct ascent, where the Apollo spacecraft would land on the Moon and return to the Earth as one unit, or Earth orbit rendezvous, where the spacecraft would be assembled while still in orbit around the Earth.