A trip to the moon

Moon Day – July 20 – honors the first American astronauts who landed on the moon in 1969. Celebrate by making your own spaceship.

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Posted on Jul 01 2015 in For Youth, Kids Projects

astronaut-craft-moonWhat you need:

  • One plastic bottle
  • One bottle of white acrylic paint
  • One pair of scissors
  • One piece of cardboard
  • One roll of silver duct tape
  • One 8.5″ by 11″ sheet of paper
  • One sheet of assorted stickers
  • One black permanent marker
  • Three peg dolls

What to do:

  • Cover a plastic bottle with white acrylic paint and let dry.
  • Apply second coat of paint if needed.
  • Cut rocket ship’s wings out of cardboard. Make the triangular wings approximately 5″ by 4″. (We added a footer to our wings.)
  • Cover wings with silver duct tape.
  • Tape cardboard wings to bottom of plastic bottle.
  • Personalize rocket with stickers.
  • Cut one side of a sheet of paper with duct tape.
  • Cut paper into circle with a diameter of at least 5″.
  • Cut slit into circle.
  • Pull the edges of the paper together to form a cone shape.
  • Place cone on top of rocket and tape to water bottle lid.
  • Paint three peg dolls with white paint and leave an unpainted opening for their faces.
  • Draw astronaut outfits on the pen dolls using a black marker.

American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. made history when they landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, beating the Soviets in that part of our world’s space race.

After traveling through space for four days and then safely arriving at the moon, Armstrong radioed Mission Control in Houston, Texas, and said, “The Eagle has landed.” “Eagle” was the name of Apollo 11’s lunar module, the only part of the spacecraft that actually landed on the moon.

When Armstrong took the first steps on the moon, he said the now famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

The Apollo program, which later conducted five more successful moon-landing missions, required roughly 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists and cost $24 billion, or $100 billion in today’s economy.

Twelve astronauts, including Armstrong and Aldrin, have walked on the moon’s surface, but since the last Apollo mission in 1972, no one has been to the moon or in lunar orbit.

Source: History.com