I pride myself in being able to find the answer to almost any question if you think about it long enough. Need someones help for this one....Earth travels along at about 64000 mph, with the Moon taging along. Apollos' top speed was about 16000 mph. In a 2 1/2 day journey from Earth to the Moon, how does Apollo keep up with the Earth as it shoots along 4 time faster than it.

Well you're not really looking at the situation correctly. Both the Earth and moon are orbiting the Sun at about the same speed, so the moon doesn't "tag along behind." The Earth destorts the moon's orbit about the sun so that it follows an orbit about us.

Now to Apollo. It travelled at 16000 mph with respect to Earth, that means it was actually going at 16000mph if you assume that the Earth was stationary. If we assume that the sun is the stationary position, then Earth is going at 64000mph and Apollo was going at 64000mph in the same direction as Earth, plus 16000mph in the direct of the moon (remember velocity is a vector so it has a direction and a magnitude), and there's the answer to your problem, you're not considering the system the same way when you compare the two valuses. One is with respect to the Sun and the Earth's orbit, and the other is with respect to the Earth.

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Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

Newton's first law of motion.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves

Remember that, before launch, each Apollo mission was also orbiting the sun at 64000 mph, by virtue of being gravitationally bound to the Earth.

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The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Perhaps another way to think of this: imagine that you are on a train going at 100 km/h, holding an apple.

You now toss the apple to a friend sitting in a seat across the aisle from you. Does the apple go flying backward at 100 km/h?

No. The apple, you and the train are all doing 100km/h, so relative to each other, all three are effectively stationary. Same with the Apollo missions. When they launched, they had the same velocity as the Earth/Moon system in it's orbit around the sun, so they didn't get 'left behind' when they launched.

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