How to fly to the moon.

 In 1969, NASA landed their first spacecraft with live cargo on the moon, dubbed Apollo 11. There was many reasons why they wanted to do this, one was to make a space base on the moon for war (due to this being in the height of the cold war), but they wanted to push the boundaries of what was actually possible to achieve. Bearing in mind, every computer in Houston, the main base for the mission, was less than what you currently have in your pocket each day. It was amazing that they even managed to get something there, let alone getting it back or it being so fragile.

So what challenges did the team face? First was the getting there. The massive rockets you see in all space games, in news or old images were actually just for getting out of the Earth's atmosphere. When launching the rocket, gravity was pulling down on the rocket so they had to make an engine powerful enough to resist and overcome gravity. Next was friction. Due to the contents of our atmosphere, the spacecraft had a constant resistive force opposing its motion as the particles in the air collided with the craft which slows it minutely but added up over a given time. All of this was relatively easy, all it required was some engineers and physicists to work together to create an engine powerful enough. After this was keeping the payload undamaged, in our case it would be humans. Humans by nature are quite fragile and needy: they need food, water, a consistent pressure, a place to get rid of waste, not too much G-force experienced, oxygen to breath, maybe entertainment and to be trained. So overall it was quite a task to maintain a semi-constant internal environment whilst also travelling at many times the speed of sound (approximately 32.6x the speed of sound at its Max m/s, source). Still not the hardest part of the mission. Now after they get to the moon, have a little play around, maybe take some samples, they needed to get back. Unlike probes or satellites, humans kind of have to return home after their mission. This required the ingenuity of many engineers to make the Apollo 11 craft have both landing and launching capabilities, allowing the craft to propel itself off of the lunar face and to the command module ready to take them back into Earth's orbit. This mission ended with a splash landing in the Pacific ocean, not the most gracious landing after such a complex mission but the astronauts were unharmed and Apollo 11 was deemed a success. This Apollo program then extended into 1972 before the costs of launching the craft far outweighed the study available on the moon (source for mission).

So why was this mentioned? Recently (24/8/23), both Russia and India decided they would like to probe the moon. Russia arrived first and promptly crashed, destroying a lot of the probe and rendered it scrap. India however had a 'soft landing'. This means that the craft landed without significant damage to the craft or its payload. So how does this link? Getting anything to space is difficult, not to mention landing it. But you need to think about what we achieved over 50 years ago. Getting something there, back and undamaged truly demonstrated how human ingenuity and teamwork can truly achieve great things within a cosmic theme.