George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt by Lucy Hawking Page B

ever to visit the Moon.
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    Astronaut Armstrong was the first to step out of the capsule onto the Moon (with his left foot). Buzz Aldrin followed him and looked around—at the totally black sky, the impact craters, the layers of moondust—and commented, “Magnificent desolation.’ As they’d been instructed, they quickly put Moon rocks and dust into their pockets, so that they would have some samples of the Moon, even if they had to leave in a hurry.
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    In fact, they stayed for nearly a day on the Moon and covered over half a mile on foot. This epic voyage of Apollo 11 remains one of the most inspirational journeys into the unknown that mankind has ever undertaken, and three craters to the north of the Sea of Tranquility are now named after the astronauts on the mission—Collins, Armstrong, and Aldrin.

    Walking on the Moon
    Including those on Apollo 11 , a total of twelve astronauts have now walked on the Moon. But each mission was still a dangerous business, as was clearly shown on the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970, when an explosion on board the service module meant that not only the astronauts but also the people on the ground had to make heroic efforts to return the spacecraft safely to Earth.
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    All the Apollo astronauts, including the ones from the harrowing 13 mission, came back safely. Astronauts are highly trained specialists with backgrounds in aviation, engineering, and science. But to launch and operate a space mission, people with a wide variety of skills are needed. The Apollo missions—like all space missions before and since—were the result of work by tens of thousands of people who built and operated the complex hardware and software.
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    The Apollo missions also brought back 840 pounds of lunar material to be studied on Earth. This allowed scientists on our planet to gain a much better understanding of the Moon and how it relates to the Earth.
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    The last mission to the Moon was Apollo 17 , which landed on the Taurus-Littrow highlands on December 11, 1972, and stayed for three days. When they were 18,000 miles from the Earth, the Apollo 17 crew took a photo of the complete Earth, fully lit. This photo is known as The Blue Marble and may be the most widely distributed photo ever. Since then, no human being has been far enough away from the Earth to take such a picture.
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    The First Man in Space
    The Apollo missions were not the first time that man had flown into space. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth on April 12, 1961, in the Vostok spacecraft, was the first-ever human being in space.

    Six weeks after Gagarin’s historic achievement, U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced that he wanted to land a man on the Moon within ten years, and the newly created NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—set to work to see if they could match the Russian manned space program, even though at that time, NASA had only sixteen minutes of spaceflight experience. The space race—to be the first on the Moon—had begun!
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    Mercury, Gemini—and Walking in Space
    Project Mercury, an American single-astronaut program, was designed to see if human beings could survive in space. In 1961 astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space with a suborbital flight of fifteen minutes, and the following year, John Glenn became the first NASA astronaut to orbit the Earth.
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    NASA’s Project Gemini followed. Gemini was a very important project, since it taught astronauts how to dock vehicles in space. It also allowed them to practice operations such as space walks—also called EVAs (Extra Vehicular Activity). But the first space walk ever performed was by a Russian cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov, in 1965. The Russians didn’t make it to the Moon, however, with this honor going to the United States in 1969.
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    The First Space Stations
    After the race to land on the Moon was over, many