The question Neil Armstrong asked today is the same one he’s been asking since days after he galloped in his space suit across the dimpled surface of our scarred moon.
Now what?
That’s not what the men who went to the moon had in mind.
Earlier in the day, seven Apollo astronauts, including Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin, used a news conference to talk about their desire to go to Mars and not focus on the moon as long as NASA plans.
“All of us here are pretty much convinced that Mars is a goal to shoot for,” said Tom Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, which orbited the moon and tested the lunar module.
On the 40th anniversary of man’s first moon landing, the Apollo 11 crew met with President Barack Obama, who used the opportunity to talk about inspiration and science and math education. He didn’t talk about going anywhere in space, not the moon or Mars.
Obama said he wanted to use Monday’s anniversary of the Apollo moon landing to show that “math and science are cool again.”
For his part Obama said he wanted to make sure that when another generation looks to the sky, NASA “is going to be there for them when they want to take their journey.”
But he didn’t say where or when that journey should go.
John F. Kennedy wanted to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Five years ago, Bush said he wanted to land astronauts back on the moon by 2020.
So with Armstrong standing next to him and nodding, Obama said those magic words: “Keep the goal by 2020.”
But he wasn’t finished. “Keep the goal by 2020 of having the highest college graduation rates of any country on Earth, especially in the math and science fields.”
It was not about going somewhere old or new. It wasn’t about NASA. It was about education.
The president said he recalled watching Apollo astronauts return to Hawaii after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. He said he’d sit on his grandfather’s shoulders and “we’d pretend like they could see us as we were waving at folks coming home.” The touchstone for excellence in exploration and discovery is always going to be represented by the men of Apollo 11,” Obama said. He said their work sparked “innovation, the drive, the entrepreneurship, the creativity back here on Earth.”
Less than an hour later at the White House, another star of the 1960s wandered about. It was the actress June Lockhart, who regularly visits the White House since receiving a press pass decades ago. Her television show? “Lost In Space.”
Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, Google (Google) has introduced a new feature in Google Earth, adding Earth’s most faithful follower to the popular geo application.
Google has been diligently adding data to Google Earth (Google Earth), expanding the geo-centric app to cover the sky, the ocean’s depths and the Red Planet. You can now explore the Moon from the same icon in the top toolbar that holds Sky, Mars and Earth. Fire it up, and you can explore lunar imagery, historical data, images and videos from the Apollo missions, panoramic images of the moon, 3D models of lunar modules and more.
Check out a brief introduction to this new feature in the video below. You can download the latest version of Google Earth 5.0 here.
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