In recent years we have witnessed renewed interest in missions to the Moon. In addition to the United States and Russia, who dominated the exploration of the Moon during the first two decades of the Space Age, there are now many new players in the game, including the European Space Agency, Japan, China, and India. While recent missions continue to add much to our knowledge about the Moon, only fifty years ago such voyages required the mastery of cutting-edge technology and frequently ended in disappointing failure.
During the opening years of the Space Age, NASA struggled to get probes to the Moon, initially with programs it had inherited from the military (see “The Pioneer lunar orbiters: a forgotten failure”, The Space Review, December 13, 2010). Out of all of its attempts to launch probes towards the Moon, only the diminutive Pioneer 4 built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and launched on March 3, 1959, by a team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) headed by Wernher von Braun (which would become the basis of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center) managed to break free of the Earth and make a distant flyby of the Moon.
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