Abstract
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.
The boy looks and looks the boy looks at the Moon.
Federico Garcia Lorca
The Moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.
Arthur C. Clarke.
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Notes
- 1.
The reasons given by Odysseus, in canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno, to convince his reluctant companions to venture into the uncharted sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
- 2.
“War is the mother of all and the king of all” is one of the famous sayings of Heraclitus. Born in the city of Ephesus on the coast of Ionia in the sixth century BC, the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher placed competition at the center of his thinking.
- 3.
“Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis” (history is truly the witness of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the director of life, the herald of antiquity), from On the Orator by Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 BC.
- 4.
Dictum first argued by Parmenides, an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia (Southern Italy).
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Capaccioli, M. (2024). Ballad of the Moon Moon. In: Red Moon. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54760-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54760-7_1
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