One of the oldest theories of the origin of the Moon is that it fissioned from the Earth. Such a process may have been general in the solar system and the formation of the planets may have been a destructive rather than a constructive process. They could have formed by spinning off a single huge planet, like Jupiter, instead of accumulating separately by some process of independent condensation at various distances from the center of the solar nebula. Dr. O'Keefe, an astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., proposes that the results of Apollo confirm the fission process for the origin of the Moon.