The Science of a Moon Landing

For most of human history, the Moon was something people looked at, wrote poems about, blamed for strange behavior, planted flags at on maps that made no geographic sense, and occasionally accused of controlling everything from tides to romance. It was reliably overhead, conveniently unreachable, and therefore safe from tourists.Then somebody decided we should go there.That decision immediately created a collection of scientific problems so enormous that any reasonable civilization might have reconsidered and spent the money on better lawn furniture. The Moon is roughly a quarter-million miles away, has essentially no atmosphere, swings between brutal temperature extremes, offers no breathable air, no convenient emergency room, no roadside assistance, and no known place to purchase a sandwich. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, the United States had committed itself to landing people there and bringing them home alive.The astonishing part is that it worked.