The US today proudly marks the 40th anniversary of its conquest of the moon, a triumph of scientific endeavor now remembered at a time when US dominance in space is increasingly uncertain.
US President Barack Obama starts a week of events today when he meets at the White House with the crew of the Apollo 11 mission, who became the first to accomplish the dream of ages and walk on the surface of the moon.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” astronaut Neil Armstrong said as he stepped down from the lunar lander on July 20, 1969, as an estimated 500 million people on Earth crowded round televisions and radios.
Four decades ago, at the height of the Cold War, the US achievement was a huge morale booster to a country mired in the bloody Vietnam war, ushering in a new sense of confidence and challenging concepts of science and religion.
“Armstrong is on the moon — Neil Armstrong, 38-year-old American, standing on the surface of the moon, on this July 20, 19 hundred and 69,” US newscaster Walter Cronkite intoned.
“Whew, boy,” exclaimed Cronkite, who died last week aged 92. “There he is, there’s a foot coming down the steps. So there’s a foot on the moon.”
But dreams that one day we might all be able to travel to the stars have been rudely brought down to earth.
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.
Now ambitious plans to put US astronauts back on the moon by 2020 to establish manned lunar bases for further space exploration to Mars under the Constellation project are increasingly in doubt.
And other nations such as Russia, China and even India and Japan are increasingly honing and expanding their own space programs.
“I think we are at an extremely critical juncture as we celebrate this anniversary, because we at least in the US are in the process of deciding ... what is the future of humans in space,” said John Logsdon, an expert in aerospace history at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
“And without government funding nothing happens,” he said.
The cost of the Constellation project is put at about US$150 billion, but estimates for the Ares I launcher to put the project into orbit have skyrocketed from US$26 billion in 2006 to US$44 billion last year.
The mounting costs prompted Obama, soon after he took office, to order a close examination of the program. A blue-ribbon panel of experts headed by former Lockheed Martin chief executive officer Norman Augustine is due to issue recommendations in late August.
“With a few exceptions, we have the technology or the knowledge that we could go to Mars if we wanted with humans,” Augustine said recently.
“We could put a telescope on the moon if we wanted,” he said.
“The technology is by and large there. It boils down to what can we afford?” he said.
Currently NASA’s budget is too small to pay for Constellation’s Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, as well as the Ares I and Ares V launchers needed to put the craft in orbit.
With a space exploration budget of US$6 billion this year, US Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut, said: “NASA simply can’t do the job it’s been given.”
Democratic Representative Barney Frank, who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is one of the budget skeptics.
“Manned space travel adds far more cost than is justified in terms of scientific return,” he said recently, mentioning the lower cost of sending robotic probes.
But events are planned around the US to mark today’s historic anniversary. Celebrations will be held from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Apollo 11 mission blasted off to mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and at the Air and Space Museum in the US capital.
Also See: The day the world changed
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS