To the Moon…

That is a picture of a picture that was made into a mural on the wall at the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, Michigan. While this may not fit directly into the Military History theme of the blog, it does fit around the edges.

The race to moon started as far back as the first time that someone looked up and say it hanging in the sky, and wondered “I wonder what’s up there?” Early Science Fiction writers came up with many different scenarios of what is there and how we can find out. It was not until the chaos of WWII that the idea finally looked like it would be a reality.

Above is a V2 from an earlier post. The first guided missile that the Germans used to effect against England. The German engineers that came up with that became one of the great prizes of WWII.  The Americans, British and Russians all looked to claim their brains. That race itself has had books written on them, so I won’t go into a lot of detail, to read more about it go here.

http://www.operationpaperclip.info/

The Great Race

And thus the ground work for the Space Race was laid. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 the marathon became a sprint. The desire to reach the moon became a national obsession. President Kennedy made his famous challenge at Rice University in 1962. In the speech he explained why we had to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

With those words a new gear was reached in the development of the technology that was needed to reach that goal. In 1969 with Apollo 11 we finally reached the moon and a new place in the human epoch.