Quick question on getting to the moon

The Apollo shots orbited around the earth a few times I believe before transferring to the moon orbit. My question is - do you need to have orbital speed to get to the moon? Can you not (e.g. like armadillo) just fly straight up at a relatively low speed, but keep thrusting, and eventual impact the moon? If you wanted to soft land I guess you would need to match the moon orbital velocity (1.03km/s), but I would think a hard landing would be a good first effort.



James

You have to gain escape energy. If you do it slowly you encounter huge losses from gravity. The faster you go, the easier it is.

Once you get to a certain point, the Moons gravity becomes the dominant force and you start to fall towards the moon.

If the moon wasn't there, you woul either enter a highly elliptical orbit (probably intercepting the surface of the Earth) or eventually reach the point where escape velocity is very small.

Or something...

You generally would go around once because it's much easier to target that way. LRO/LCROSS did that. And you need to launch east to take advantage of the boost in speed you get from the earth's rotation.