Fly Me to the Moon

Gagarin’s death in a plane crash in 1968 was another sign of fate. With the Russians entering a difficult period in their history and the West going through the problematic Sixty-Eight, NASA completed the Gemini program, which had started in 1964, achieving all its intended goals in preparation for lunar missions: testing guidance systems assigned to astronaut abilities and performing increasingly reckless extravehicular activities and docking between two units in flight. The Soviets, for their part, clung to sporadic successes, such as a soft lunar landing by a robotic vehicle in 1967 and a mission to Venus, which the Yankees tried in vain to match. Finally, following the completion of the Gemini flights, von Braun was authorized to proceed with the project to put two astronauts on the Moon using the powerful Saturn V rocket and the Apollo spacecraft. After a tragic start and three unmanned missions to test the hardware, while the Russians continued their Soyuz tandem experiments in preparation for the space station, the sequence of manned Apollo missions began, which, following a strategy conceived 45 years earlier by a Ukrainian, Yuri Kondratyuk, would lead to Armstrong and Aldrin closing the game with a clear victory on July 22, 1969.