[Writer Name]

Min

Guided Research Skills

January 4, 2012

Why was the Moon Landing needed for the United States?

Introduction

This discussion will highlight the relevance of the Moon Landing for the United States and the reasons because of which it was important for the U.S. to be a winner in the space race between the Soviet Union. The discussion will discuss the characteristics of the US missions to the moon and their importance in a broad perspective.

Discussion

On July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module Eagle, commanded by Neil Armstrong and carrying him and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, touched down on the surface of the Moon; the third Apollo 11 astronaut, Michael Collins, orbited above in Command Module Columbia. The event electrified not just the U.S. but the world — for the first time in history, human beings had set foot on a different world (Kelly). The 40th anniversary of the landing has arrived, and a variety of observances are under way to mark the occasion. Among other things, NASA has mounted an extensive website giving information on the Apollo program and the effort to go to the Moon.

The technological challenge of building a spacecraft that could carry humans to the Moon, land on it, and then safely return to Earth was immense; accomplishing the feat required progress across a wide variety of fronts. The river of money that flowed into the space program accelerated progress in rocketry, in computers, in materials science, even in biology and medicine (an array of monitors recorded, for example, how the astronauts' bodies responded to weightlessness and other features of the strange environment they inhabited).

And there is the Moon itself. It is the only heavenly body other than our own planet that humans have explored and obtained geological samples from (Kelly). Robot spacecraft have landed on Mars, Venus and elsewhere in the Solar System, conducted tests, and radioed data back to Earth, but as informative as these missions have been, there is a gulf between having a rock on hand that can be studied in a nearly infinite number of ways, and relying on a few instruments operated by very remote control. The information we have obtained, and continue to obtain, from samples brought back from the Moon has significantly expanded our understanding of geological processes.

Beyond the concrete ways in which the Moon program increased scientific knowledge, it exerted a profound, if somewhat difficult to assess, psychological influence. With the space program, and the Moon landing in particular, science became glamorous. A survey conducted by Nature of 800 scientists found that half of them were inspired, to some extent, to become scientists by the Apollo missions; nearly a fifth of those questioned indicated it had been a strong influence. Undoubtedly our country and the whole world still reap the benefit of those many individual decisions to enter science.

People have long dreamed of traveling to regions beyond the earth and of visiting the moon and other celestial bodies. Many advances in the theory of spaceflight were made in the first half of the 20th ...