ASTRONOMY 101: NASA'S APOLLO PROGRAM

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy promised that the United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The sheer audacity and scale of Kennedy’s vision is now hard to comprehend. It would cost $120 billion, employ 400,000 people at its peak, use rockets and computers not yet even imagined, let alone designed, and new alloys yet to be discovered.

Before the Apollo project began NASA's Mercury and Gemini programs put astronauts into Earth orbit and tested docking procedures necessary for a lunar landing. Launched by the largest rocket built, the mighty Saturn V, the Apollo spacecraft was made up of three parts.

It's Christmas Day, 1968 and the crew of NASA's Apollo
8 take a photograph that would become the iconic image
of the sixties. It would also become the most profound
environmental photograph of all time.
They called it 'Earthrise'.

These were the command module where the astronauts lived on the journey and the only part that returned to Earth; the service module that provided the power and consumables; and the lunar module that would allow the astronauts to descend to the lunar surface.

The first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon was Apollo 8 on Christmas Day, 1968, famous for the iconic ‘Earthrise’ photograph that showed the fragility of our planet along with Commander Jim Lovell’s beautiful Genesis narrative. On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins on board. On July 20, 1969 the lunar module "Eagle", with Armstrong and Aldrin aboard descended to the Sea of Tranquillity on the lunar surface, an event watched by millions worldwide on television. Armstrong lowered a ladder and stepped down on the moon's surface. It was "one small step for man, but one giant leap for mankind." It was the first step by mankind on another world.

ASTRONOMY 101: THE MOON

Our Moon is far more important to all life on Earth than most people realise.  Simply illuminating the night sky or being responsible for ocean tides is of relatively little significance when one realises its true effect on the Earth and us.  It has been intrinsic to the very evolution of life itself, and by definition the appearance of homo sapiens!  And it's not hard to see why it is so important. 

The Moon with labelled 'seas' and craters.

To start with it is the only Moon of a major planet in the solar system that is so large relative to its parent planet, indeed many astronomers consider the Earth/Moon system to be a double or binary planetary system.  At 385,000 kilometres distant it is the closest celestial body to the Earth.

The Moon was created from the Earth itself, confirmed by the geological experiments undertaken during the NASA Apollo program.  Unlike the Earth, there is very little iron on its surface and it consists of terrestrial mantle material.