While it is true that the Moon's stunning vistas can provide many hours of entertainment of the ‘sight-seeing’ kind, I would argue that observing the Moon is ultimately a sterile and pointless exercise unless one is attempting to understand and know it better. If you accept that premise then it follows that having some knowledge and understanding of the Moon, including knowing what mysteries still remain to be solved, will expand, and give some meaning and purpose to, your observations of it.

In that spirit I offer the following highly abridged account of the space-borne missions to the Moon together with some of our modern ideas about the physical nature and evolution of the Moon that arose because of them.

THE FIRST LUNAR SCOUTS

In 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first powered flights at Kitty Hawk. Astonishingly, it was only 66 years later that Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin stepped from their space-going vehicle onto the Moon's alien surface. The pace of progress at that time was breath-taking. Indeed, it was only in 1957, a mere dozen years before that first manned Moon-landing, that the Earth's first man-made satellite – Sputnik 1 – was launched into orbit, marking the true beginning of the ‘Space Age’. The many elements of progress – such as in launch-vehicle design, probes, satellites, telecommunications, and much, much, more – all form part of a complex story. Here, though, I can mention only the main highlights.