Space milestone: 40-year anniversary
Footprint in time as world celebrates lunar landing
Article published on the 2009-07-20 Latest update 2009-07-20 09:47 TU
This image, dated July 20, 1969, shows the lunar footprint of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
(Photo: Reuters/Nasa)
An estimated 500 million people on Earth crowded round televisions and radios as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander onto the moon's Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969.
The crew accomplished the dream of an age - though with spiralling costs, US dominance in space has now become far less certain. The lunar landing was a huge morale boost for a country mired in the Vietnam war and on edge due to the Cold War.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, left, and Gene Kranz, retired NASA flight director, celebrate this week at the Salute to Apollo ceremony in Washington.
(Photo: Reuters)
As astronauts from the Apollo program attend a news conference in Washington Monday, there will be a simultaneous broadcast to science centres across the United States about the Apollo legacy and the future of space exploration.
The Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Apollo 11 mission blasted off, will join the celebrations, as will the mission control at Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas and Washington's National Air and Space Museum.
Buzz Aldrin, second to step onto the moon, said what stayed with him most was a realisation, upon touchdown, of the scope of what NASA had achieved. "What I want to remember most is the glance between Neil and myself, with the engine shutoff, just those seconds after we touched down," he said.
But NASA's ambitious plans to put US astronauts back on the moon by 2020 to establish manned lunar bases for further exploration to Mars under the Constellation project are increasingly in doubt.
Only 12 men, all Americans, have ever walked on the moon, and the last to set foot there were in 1972, at the end of the Apollo missions.
