Apollo +40

Boiling noons and cryogenic nights will prove two of the hells inflicted upon a sun-fueled rover when it retraces Neil Armstrong’s first steps across the moon in 2011, beaming home high-definition footage along the way.

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On the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, it seems like every news outlet worth its weight in regolith is reproducing classic content to put the historic moment in the proper content. Well, here’s one Apollo-related news item, printed on July 17th, as Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins were well on their way to the Moon, that I doubt the New York Times wants to draw much attention to today: a retraction of a 1920 article which stated rocket motors couldn't work in the vacuum of space, almost fifty years after the fact.

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Genius idea from Jason Kottke--he's synced up Walter Cronkite's live call of the moon landing on CBS to real time, forty years forward. And they're just about to land.

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For your convenience, NASA has here superimposed a map of Aldrin and Armstrong's strolls around the Sea of Tranquility onto a standard baseball diamond.

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Earthlings can celebrate 40 years since the first lunar landing by planting their virtual boots back on the moon in Google Earth. Or they can just swoop over the 3-D lunar landscape, Superman-style.

Google unveiled the new "Moon in Google Earth" feature today during a press conference in Washington, D.C. Those in attendance included female space tourist Anousheh Ansari, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and NASA officials.

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With the monotone bleeps of Sputnik still ringing in a rattled nation's ears, President Eisenhower committed America to a program of manned space flight, a program culminating in the Apollo 11 mission and its legendary moon landing.

Whether you believe the astronauts went in peace for all mankind, or as part of a nationalistic competition driven by Cold War paranoia, there's no escaping the profound impact the moon landing had on the human psyche. The moon landing showed the whole world how technology can shift the bounds of the possible, and Popular Science was there the whole way.

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Last week, a fly-by of the moon showed impressions remaining on the surface from the Apollo 11 landing. That was 40 years ago, and those impressions linger on undisturbed. It's that longevity that one company wants to exploit, carving messages into the surface in the moon for the purpose of selling ad space.

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If you haven't yet noticed, today we're celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, and the first humans to step foot on the moon, which happened at around 4:15 pm EST, July 20, 1969. And in perhaps the world's most fitting use of this particular cliché, Things Have Never Been the Same.

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It's been 40 years since Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin landed the Apollo 11 lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility. Aldrin, now 79 years old, recalls that fateful day with clarity. Alarms were sounding inside the space capsule during their speedy descent, and even down to the last seconds, the astronauts were uncertain whether they would need to abort the landing. Millions of Earthlings watched on television as the Eagle touched down.

Much has changed over four decades, and despite the success of the International Space Station, enhanced shuttle technology, robotic rovers, and satellites which bring us back daily analytical data from our solar system, the visionary optimism that once propelled the space race and captured the world's collective imagination has waned. Ironically, with the loss of this optimism, the very notion of manned space travel beyond our moon seems to have become antiquated itself.

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