To the Moon and Back chapter sampler

CHAPTER 1

The Space Race

There was another beginning, of course — in 1961 — when the young American President, John F. Kennedy, promised that the United States would land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. Human beings had already gone to the Moon, but only in our imaginations. We had been gazing at it, wondering what was there, studying it ever since Galileo’s first modern telescope could show us those strange markings were craters. Science fiction stories and comic strips had talked of colonising the Moon for decades. But even though German scientists had created rockets that might be able to fly above Earth’s atmosphere during World War II — and the same scientists were now working for the United States or the Soviet Union — by the 1960s most scientists and technicians thought that a journey to the Moon was still decades away — if

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