EARTH’S NEAREST NEIGHBOR Have you ever looked up at the moon and wondered what it would be like to be there It’s very different from Earth and it’s very far away Scientists think Earth’s moon was formed about 4 5 billion years ago It’s an average of about 238,000 miles 383,023 km away from Earth and it’s only about a quarter as large as our planet Because it’s so much smaller the gravity is much less than on Earth so everything weighs less than it does here Expedition Report Days on the moon are very long about 708 hours That means it gets very hot during the day as hot as 273 Fahrenheit 4 134 Celsius It can be as cold as 243 Fahrenheit 153 Celsius at night
Anyone can look at the moon but only 12 men can say they’ve actually been there Only 12 people all Americans have ever set foot on the moon The first mission to reach the moon left Earth on July 16 1969 with three men on board This was the Apollo 11 mission 5
RACE TO THE MOON People have been interested in the moon for thousands of years but the real space race began in the 1950s when two rival nations the United States and the Soviet Union tried to see who could get there first The Soviets put the first satellite called Sputnik 1 into Earth orbit in 1957 They made the first craft Luna 2 to reach the moon two years later In 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space A month later Alan Shepard became the first American in space and John Glenn Expedition Report In a famous speech on September 12 1962 U S President John F Kennedy challenged the American space agency NASA to put a man on the moon and return him safely home before the end of the decade 6
Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space on May 5 1961 lift-off of the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission on February 20 1962 became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962 The early U S space program had three stages The Mercury rockets carried astronauts into space and the Gemini rockets helped them learn to maneuver The Apollo rockets went to the moon 7
