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fired their 3 rd stage rocket, and propelled Luna 1 at its intended target – the Moon, some 239,000 miles away.
    And they missed. By far more than the proverbial mile. By 3,725 of them to be exact.
    Again, not to overemphasize points I have already made in The Choice and Dark Mission , but that is simply not possible if Newtonian mechanics is correct. To miss the Moon by more than one and a half times its own diameter when you’re already weightless and in Earth orbit is pretty much impossible, unless the laws of physics are somehow far different than we have been led to believe.
    Meanwhile, the U.S. didn’t fare much better. In early 1959 a JPL constructed satellite, Pioneer 4, missed the Moon by a whopping 37,000 miles, more than 17 times the Moon’s diameter! Obviously, there were issues with navigating the space between Earth and our nearest neighbor, issues which were not successfully solved until many years later, when the Ranger 4 spacecraft lost all power shortly after achieving orbit, and subsequently did what no other American probe had yet been able to do – actually hit the Moon. Eventually, von Braun and NASA figured out that having active, spinning systems on board the spacecraft added energy to the system, and once they empirically accounted for this the era of modern lunar exploration really began (see The Choice).
    The U.S. programs started with the Ranger series in the early 1960’s. These were designed to fly into the Moon at high velocity, transmitting back television images the entire way to give humans the first close-up views of the lunar surface. As I discussed in The Choice , there really wasn’t a fully successful Ranger mission until Ranger 7 in 1964, but the program allowed von Braun and NASA to figure out the hidden physics of interplanetary navigation. Ranger was soon followed by two new and parallel programs, Lunar Orbiter, which was to take reconnaissance photographs and map the entire surface of the Moon, and Surveyor, which was to test the ability to soft land on the lunar surface and study it.
    The Lunar Orbiter series was highly successful, with all five missions being completed essentially as planned. Lunar Orbiter 1 was obviously the first in the series, launched in August 1966, and it was to photograph the equatorial section of the Moon’s near side so NASA could scout for possible manned landing sites. From an altitude that varied from 36 to 25 miles above the lunar surface, Lunar Orbiter 1 took some 42 high resolution and 187 medium resolution “frames” of the lunar surface (the camera was a line-by-line scanning system that transmitted images back to Earth as “framelets” that were lined up and reassembled as full images on Earth). The most famous image from Lunar Orbiter 1 was of the first view ever of the Earth from lunar orbit.
    Once its mission was complete and its film exhausted, the spacecraft was deliberately crashed into the lunar surface in order to test NASA’s ability to remotely track the vehicle.
    Like Lunar Orbiter l, Lunar Orbiter II (November, 1966) was designed as a landing site reconnaissance mission of the Moon’s equatorial region from high altitude (32 miles). It took a total of 609 high resolution and 208 medium resolution frames but because of the altitude, they were of questionable value. Lunar Orbiter II did become famous for an oblique view of the peak of the crater Copernicus which was hailed at the time as one of the great photos of the 20 th century. But the most interesting photo Lunar Orbiter II took was by far image number LO2-61H3, which showed peaks that came to be known simply as “The Blair Cuspids.”
    On November 22, 1966, – three years to the day from the date President Kennedy had been killed — NASA released a Lunar Orbiter II image from the Moon in the vicinity of the crater Cayley B in the Sea of Tranquility. In it, there were objects casting extremely long shadows that seemed to imply that the objects themselves were