Where Dreams Come True
Image from penny4nasa,org As far as anyone knows, no one from Earth has ever stood on the dark side of the moon. To date, the U.S. is the only country to have successfully put people onto the lunar surface but those landings were all made on the side of the moon that faces our planet. The U.S. lunar landings resulted from a furious national scramble to catch up with the USSR who, early on, was way ahead of us in the space race. Russia had thrown down the gauntlet in 1957 by launching Sputnik into orbit. The beach ball-sized satellite circled the earth every 92 minutes until it fell from its orbit three months later, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. This rattled everybody’s cage; creating an instant crisis for American politicians, scientists, our military and us plain folks. I remember being on a camping trip near the Salton Sea , lying in my sleeping bag, looking up and watching Sputnik drift slowly across the night sky above. Image from vintag.es Ther