Anyone got a good link to an explanation of how all of these moon missions actually work? I was really thinking about it differently today, and I was thinking I always see little graphics of it where it's on 2 or 3 planes, and essentially we just shoot a space ship towards the moon, do a loop (or loops) around it, and slingshot back.
But today I'm like, wait, in all of these we're breaking free of Earth's gravitational field, but how come nothing is accounting for the fact that the Earth and moon are hurtling through space in an entirely separate axis? Essentially we're throwing the spaceship in a single direction, but the Earth and moon are making a giant orbit around the sun. The second we're in that gap between handing off between Earth orbit and moon orbit, wouldn't the thing just get stuck out in the middle of space as the Earth and moon both keep traveling tens of thousands of miles per hour around the sun?
Or am I missing a step where the spaceship somehow manages to maintain a consistent orbit around the Earth that mirrors the moon, while also moving towards it? That way it'd always be traveling "towards" the moon, as opposed to just catching it on one of its orbits?
