Free Who Built the Moon? by Christopher Knight, Alan Butler

dramatically slowing down the rate of overall progress. In the light of all this, Congress decided to side step military fiefdoms and set up a new organization to oversee and coordinate American space research.
    Accordingly the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed on October 1 st 1958 and the idea of putting a man into space was immediately outlined, and given the title ‘Project Mercury’. But it was a race they were destined to lose because on April 12 th 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
    Gagarin’s 108-minute voyage took him once around the planet, although he was not allowed to operate the controls because the effects of weightlessness had only been tested on dogs, and scientists were concerned that he may not be able to function properly. Consequently, ground crews controlled the mission with an override key provided just in case of an emergency.
    NASA responded quickly by sending the astronaut Alan Shepherd on a ballistic trajectory sub-orbital flight to an altitude of 116 miles, returning to Earth at a landing point just 302 miles down the Atlantic Missile Range. America’s first manned space flight was a fifteen minute sky rocket event that was nowhere near the same league as Yuri Gagarin’s 25,000 mile, high-speed voyage into Earth’s orbit.
    The race to get a man into space had been won by the USSR but there was a second, more ambitious competition running in parallel. Reaching for the Moon!
    At first these were half-hearted attempts to get some metal, any bit of metal, onto the Moon. It had started with the first Pioneer rocket launched in 1958 by the United States – which lasted a full seventy-seven seconds before disintegrating into a giant fireball. A few months later the USSR launched Luna I, which performed beautifully but unfortunately missed the Moon and headed into solar orbit. In September 1959 the USSR managed to hit the bull’s-eye when Luna 2 became the first craft to land on another celestial body, slamming into the Moon’s surface just east of the Sea of Serenity. Before the impact Luna 2 was able to report back that there was something very odd about the Moon – it did not seem to have a magnetic field.
    The next Soviet craft, Luna 3, made a great stride forward by swinging around the Moon, taking photographs of the ‘dark’ side before heading back to Earth in April 1960. The Americans meanwhile had failure after failure.
    Nikita Khrushchev was pleased with the way that his nation was winning the space race and when Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth his propaganda machine went into overdrive to ensure that the world knew how superior his space engineers were. America’s newly elected President was no slouch when it came to inspiring the public and John F Kennedy decided to take control of the situation by announcing that the real battle was to put men on the Moon. Despite a history of underperformance in space technology, he rather bravely publicly pledged to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s.
    Many American Ranger and Soviet Luna spacecraft headed for the Moon during the decade but a large number missed and others crashed onto the lunar surface either by accident or sometimes by design. But it was the USSR, once again, that made the next breakthrough when Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to make a controlled landing onto the surface of another celestial body on February 3 rd 1966.
    A significant part of the problem was the weird nature of the Moon’s mass that was not at all what was expected. Instead of a generally constant gravitational field such as the Earth exhibits across its surface, the Moon is an inconsistent, lumpy ball that has huge variations in gravity from region to region.
    As we have discussed, a pendulum swings with fairly regular precision on the Earth, with only quite small variations in swing rate because of the bulging of the planet at the equator. This is due to the fact that a