Moon by the Soviet Union's Luna 2, an unmanned spacecraft. The United States' NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned lunar missions to date, beginning with the first manned orbital mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six manned landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11. These missions returned lunar rocks which have been used to develop a geological understanding of the Moon's origin, internal structure, and the Moon's later history. Since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the Moon has been visited only by unmanned spacecraft. Both the Moon's natural prominence in the earthly sky and
Back to the Moon Katrina Suttner, the young daughter of one of von Braun's colleagues, is in on a secret involving the mission, and is certain that humans will soon return to the Moon. The novel then skips ahead 30 years. Jack Medaris, the protagonist, is preparing the launch of a privately funded, unmanned mission to the Moon to gather more of the orange soil, which appears to have enormous potential as a source of clean nuclear energy on Earth. Shortly before launch, Medaris' probe is destroyed by unknown terrorists or saboteurs. It also becomes clear that Medaris is driven to go to the