After Houbolt presented the LOR concept to a series of dismissive high-level panels, he ignored the chain of command and complained in a long letter dated November 15, 1961, to Associate Administrator of NASA Robert Seamans that his proposal had been derided as "a scheme that has a 50 percent chance of getting a man to the moon and a 1 percent of getting him back." Indeed, at one of the earliest NASA panels on December 14, 1960, Houbolt was attacked in the presence of both Seamans and Wernher von Braun by fellow engineer Max Faget, who announced, "His figures lie. He doesn't know what he's talking about." However, the detailed letter to Seamans, together with studies of the difficulties posed by the need for a massive rocket in a direct ascent and the problems associated with landing a large craft on the lunar surface following an earth orbit rendezvous, led Seamans and von Braun to support LOR in 1962.