Before 1687, a large amount of data had been collected on the motions of the Moon and the planets, but a clear understanding of the forces related to these motions was not available. In that year, Isaac Newton provided the key that unlocked the secrets of the heavens. He knew, from his first law, that a net force had to be acting on the Moon because without such a force the Moon would move in a straight-line path rather than in its almost circular orbit. Newton reasoned that this force was the gravitational attraction exerted by the Earth on the Moon. He realized that the forces involved in the Earth-Moon attraction and in the Sun–planet attraction were not something special to those systems, but rather were particular cases of a general and universal attraction between objects. In other words, Newton saw that the same force of attraction that causes the Moon to follow its path around the Earth also causes an apple to fall from a tree. It was the first time that “earthly” and “heavenly” motions were unified. In this chapter, we study the law of universal gravitation. We emphasize a description of planetary motion because astronomical data provide an important test of this law’s validity. We then show that the laws of planetary motion developed by Johannes Kepler follow from the law of universal gravitation and the principle of conservation of angular momentum. We conclude by deriving a general expression for the gravitational potential energy of a system and examining the energetics of planetary and satellite motion.