Moon (rossz állapotú) [antikvár]

From the dawn of human history, man has witnessed the phenomenon of the moon rising above the horizon of the earth. For centuries man has dreamed of reversing the perspective, substituting the moon's horizon for that of the earth and the earth for the moon as the planet whose rise is perceived. It remained for the audacious astronaut crews of the U.S. Apollo program to transform this dream into reality. The earthrise photograph on the opposite page was taken by the crew of Apollo 11 on the mission that saw man Ik i-rr»^-NrM i/^TI/^K I set foot for the first time (but not the last) on the surface of INTRODUC I ION another planet. Prior to this historic event, other bold men—the crews of Apollo 8 and Apollo 10—had orbited the moon and descended to altitudes of awe-inspiring proximity to the lunar surface. These accomplishments and the actual landing of two men from Apollo 11 were witnessed by untold millions on the planet earth through television. What this first lunar landing and those which will follow portend for human history can only be surmised for the present. What is certain is that man's curiosity about his environment—and with the Apollo 11 landing, that environment extends as far as the human eye can see—^will spur him on to ever deeper exploration in space. It all began when the first, unrecorded theory about the moon and its mysterious travels and changes of phase was postulated by an early representative of the species Homo sapiens. Over the succeeding centuries the moon came to embody a practical as well as a religious significance for early man, a dual role impressively evidenced at Stonehenge (overleaf). Here, on a chalky plain in southern England, nineteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, a Stone Age people erected a megalithic assemblage of stone columns designed to serve its builders both as a temple and as an observatory. The quest for the truth about the moon progressed through millennia of myth and superstition, centuries of religious and quasi-scientific speculation and, finally, through three hundred and fifty years of modern scientific investigation. Now man can study the moon at firsthand. He has shown that he can walk upon its surface and bring back samples of lunar soil and rock for analysis in earthbound laboratories. The day in which he can establish colonies on the moon, if he so wishes, is not far distant. Even greater exploits, greater voyages and discoveries lie ahead in this new age of exploration. This book documents the first forty centuries of man's recorded efforts to apprehend the nature of the nearest of earth's celestial companions. It is impossible to predict where man's spirit of adventure and quest for knowledge will take him in the next forty centuries. It is enough for the present perhaps that we pause to reflect upon what we have attained in the long centuries from Stonehenge to the historic landing at Tranquillity Base.