Project Apollo still stands as the most ambitious manned spaceflight program and fulfilled President Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 statement to Congress that “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
The legacy of the massive financial and political commitment that allowed Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon on 20 July, 1969 is still evident today. If not for Apollo there would be no Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. We would not have created the massive Saturn V and the fragile Lunar Module that allowed 12 moonwalking astronauts to return with 382 kgs of moon rocks.
During the Apollo program, scientists had the foresight to recognize the value of the samples and established the Curatorial Facility at Johnson Space Center. They set protocols for curation, handling, and allocation in a way that would preserve portions of all samples for future generations, with special care given to the rarest and most important of them.
From the study of Apollo samples and data came the concept of the Moon’s formation via a giant impact on early Earth, which still stands as the leading hypothesis for the origin of the Moon.
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