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[reprising an edited saved bit] V.A. Firsoff (Valdemar Axel Firsoff, as it turns out) wrote a lot of books, including Strange World of the Moon published back in 1959, ten years before the manned landings started, and even before the first robotic landers.

Due to his volcanism bias -- and remember, he was writing right on the cusp of the "plate tectonics revolution", which has blindered geology worse than the knee-jerk uniformitarian gradualism that preceded it -- he wasn't able to accept that the Moon's impact craters were in fact from impact, and attributes them instead to volcanism caused by the Moon's capture by the Earth (as well as contraction of the lunar sphere). He appears to envisage three encounters between the formed Moon and the Earth, resulting in temporary capture twice leading to the eventual outright capture.

...the Moon clearly could not have been the satellite of the Earth then, for a total period of about 2,000 million years... Spurr points out that the face of the Moon shows two systems of great surface fractures, or faults, lying about 30 degrees from the two poles and trending from west-south-west to east-north-east. This is explained by him as a result of the halting of the Moon's rotation... Curiously, the face of the Earth, too, shows a similar structure, with the same general trend -- the Highland Boundary Fault... The poles of the Earth would also seem to have shifted place on at least three occasions, in the Cambrian, Permian, and (lastly) Quaternary Periods, brining ice and cold to previously warm lands... some mighty force made the crust of the Earth slip (the rotational stability of the axis of a mass as large as the Earth is enormous) and the position of the poles wobbled... there exists on the Moon a triple grid of surface fractures... perpendicular to each other within each grid, the grids being of different ages... Cambrian, Perm-Carboniferous, and Tertiary.

Firsoff's basically given us a snapshot of the problems inherent with a fission origin (having settled on an overspin origin for the Moon, very early in the history of the Earth), not least of which is that the fission origin also requires in orbit formation of the lunar sphere and capture by the Earth, while showing that capture is possible. Capture of the Moon, irrespective of its place and era of formation, is the simplest model.

The Moon is indeed a strange place . . . .

"It's like no cheese I've ever tasted."

I believe that the fission theory still seems dominant. Myself, I have problems with the capture theory, maybe because I was lousy at catching baseballs or footballs.

Yes! I was just going to say that.

You saved me a whole bunch of typing!!!!!!