Ballad of the Moon Moon

On December 11, 1972, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, two of the three astronauts on NASA's Apollo 17 mission, landed on the Moon. They were the last humans to step on the dust of our natural satellite. Then nothing more. Half a century later, the ascent to beautiful Selene has resumed, renewing that extraordinary competition between Soviets and Americans known as the Moon Race. A contest motivated mainly by the desire to prove the superiority of one social and economic system over the other, in which the Russians won all the battles and the Americans secured the final victory. When the race for supremacy was over, both contenders realized that the game was too expensive and not worth the candle to continue. Today, the reasons for returning to the Moon are others, more concrete and perhaps more risky for peace. This book revisits the epic of the conquest of the Moon to relive a heroic season and find in a now distant past some of the reasons for the present.