The Apollo project
was the most ambitious and challenging adventure in human history. Coordinated and engineered by NASA
, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, physicists and doctors collaborated in the largest mass-scientific-effort to achieve the goal of landing a man on the surface of the moon
and returning him safely to Earth
The project was well-planned with excruciating accuracy and it is rumored that NASA had produced over a 20 million pages of material during the entire course of the project.
Subsequent missions in the Mercury and Gemini projects helped scientists and engineers evaluate their hypotheses about the nature of spaceflight. The Mercury program demonstrated that a man could, in fact, be transported to outerspace, achieve orbit, maneuver and change trajectory and return safely.
The Gemini project demonstrated the ability of the state of technology and mathematics to enable multiple spacecraft to dock in orbit, which most physicist believed to be impossible.
The Apollo program combined everything learned and tested of past projects and upped it full-scale, it's first successful mission (Apollo 6) to test the command module in orbit, Apollo 7 to test the orbital-orbital docking system developed in Gemini, Apollo 8 to attempt the first orbit around the moon and to bring human beings further than ever imagined, in a place that was only conceptually tangible - the mission prior to the launch existing only on paper. Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 served as practice runs for the final showdown between man, 600,000 miles, infinite vaccuum, sub-zero temperatures, and the force of an entire planetary moon.
Apollo 11 was the craft that brought man to the moon, demonstrating the incredible power of man's cognitive faculty to extend his knowledge and consciousness past the range of the moment, past the immediate information provided by his senses, past the limits of his social context - demonstrating the awesome power of man's power to think.