took two weeks for Seamans to reply to Houbolt's letter. The associate administrator agreed that "it would be extremely harmful to our organization and to the country if our qualified staff were unduly limited by restrictive guidelines." He assured Houbolt that NASA would in the future be paying more attention to LOR than it had up to this time. In the following months, NASA did just that, and to the surprise of many both inside and outside the agency, LOR quickly became the front runner. Several factors decided the issue in its favor. First, there was growing disenchantment with the idea of direct ascent due to the time and money it was going to take to develop a diameter Nova rocket, compared to the diameter Saturn V. Second, there was increasing technical apprehension over how the relatively large spacecraft demanded by Earth-orbit rendezvous would be able to maneuver to a soft landing on the Moon. As one NASA engineer who changed his mind explained: The business of eyeballing that thing down to the Moon really didn't have a satisfactory answer. The best thing about LOR was that it allowed us to build a separate vehicle for landing. The first major group to change its opinion in favor of LOR was Robert Gilruth's Space Task Group, which was still located at Langley but was soon to move to Houston as the Manned Spacecraft Center. The second to come over was Wernher von Braun's team at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. These two powerful groups, along with the engineers who had originally developed the plan at Langley, persuaded key officials at NASA Headquarters, notably Administrator James Webb, who had been holding out for direct ascent, that LOR was the only way to land on the Moon by 1969. Webb approved LOR in July 1962. The decision was officially announced at a press conference on July 11, 1962. President Kennedy's science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, remained firmly opposed to LOR. Other plans using LOR The proposed Soviet lunar landing plan, using the N1 rocket, LK Lander and Soyuz 7K-LOK, would have used a similar LOR mission profile. The Constellation program would have used a combination of EOR and LOR for Moon landing. The Artemis program plans to use LOR to land humans on the lunar south pole region. In popular culture Episode 5 of the 1998 television miniseries From the Earth