The rockets started almost simultaneously. From two widely separated points on the great curving surface of Earth they reached upward and outward—toward the Moon. It wasn't really so strange a coincidence. Space navigation is governed by mathematics and logic, not politics. The fact that man-carrying spaceships happened to be developed concurrently on two sides of an iron curtain meant little to the Universe. It happened, that's all. And there is a proper time to launch such missiles. When that