The Moon Before Apollo Missions.
The Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972 marked a high point in lunar exploration. But Apollo didn't just rock up onto the moon out of a blue. It took many many missions by probes and Landers over the preceding years to establish if we could send men to the moon and get them back again. It's quite strange to think that even by the late 1950s just over ten years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, we knew surprisingly little about the moon other than what we could observe from the earth from the hypotheses we could draw from those observations. We knew but it had no appreciable atmosphere or large bodies of water. But we didn't know what the surface was like and we didn't know what was on the far side beside which always faces away from Earth. Sputnik. After the launch of Sputnik on October 4th 1957, the Soviets made several attempts at getting a probe to the moon. The first three launch...