Artist at Work

For the second time in a few days I was going to post a photo of the Moon to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Humankind landing there, and for the second time it was cloudy and there was no Moon in sight. But I do like posting photos of artists at work so I was pleased to photograph this lady paining the war memorial and school in town. Actually she was the second artist in town, you can tell it's holiday time.

The Race to the Moon

All of the landmarks below were amazing scientific achievements, despite some awful back history. It pushed certain technologies like communications and avionics far quicker into the future than would have otherwise happened.

- Oct 1957: Soviet Union puts the first satellite in space.  Sputnik, meaning 'fellow traveller', orbited for three weeks before its batteries died
- Jan 1959: Soviet Union sent the first spacecraft to the vicinity of the Moon, the robotic vehicle Luna 1
- Sep 1959: Soviet Luna 2 the first spacecraft to reach the Moon's surface
- Apr 1961: Yuri Gagarin is the first person to orbit the earth in Vostok 1
- May 1961: JKF announced the US intentions for a manned mission to land on the Moon before the end of the decade. Secret tapes later revealed he wasn't interested in Space exploration, but in one-upping the Soviets in the Cold War
- Feb 1966: First soft landing on the Moon by the unmanned Soviet Luna 9
- Apr 1966: The Soviet Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to actually orbit the Moon 
- Dec 1968: First crewed orbit of the Moon by Apollo 8 and the famous and thought provoking Earthrise photo was taken. It was launched by a Saturn V rocket which Wernher von Braun was instrumental in developing*
- July 20th 1969: First humans to land on the Moon in Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with Michael Collins in the Command Module. They stayed on the Moon for 22 hours
- 1969-1972: In total the US put 12 men on the Moon in 6 Apollo missions, including 3 missions that used a lunar rover. The Apollo programme cost $25.4 billion ($152 billion on today’s dollars)
- Jan 2019: China lands the first spacecraft Chang’e 4 on the “far side” or “dark side” of the Moon, communicating with Earth via a lunar satellite..


*In 1946 US government brought Wernher von Braun and about seven hundred German rocket engineers and technicians to the United States in Operation Paperclip. Von Braun had been heavily involved in developing the V2 rocket in WW2 which killed several thousand civilians (2,724 in Britain alone). What is not well known is that at least 20,000 died constructing the V2s themselves, the Germans using slave labour for this dangerous work.