Apollo Missions: Beyond the Space Race

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The Apollo missions. What exactly was their purpose? At the time, It seemed more of an "I got there first!" than anything. The United States was deeply entrenched in the Cold War, along with the soviets and whoever else wanted to take sides, and the space race was just another one of their battlegrounds in an ever-expanding battlefield of ideals or was it? Maybe something truly was achieved when Neal Armstrong's voice echoed from our static filled televisions: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". Maybe we won more than just bragging rights that day. As it turned out, we learned a lot from those missions, there was much more to it than just getting a man on the moon. We learned that the moon and the earth were very similar when it came to composition but there are enough differences that its formation can't have come from earth alone, the commonly accepted theory is called the gigantic impact theory, which explains the moon's formation by asserting that a celestial body, nearly half the size of the earth, hit the planet and cause the moon to break off and begin its orbit around the earth around 50 million years after the formation of the earth.

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