apollo missions

Apollo 14 Landing Site: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this image of the Apollo 14 landing site during its lunar tour.  NASA

Look, it's the Apollo 11 lunar module! And astronaut footprints left by Apollo 14! Well, you can make them out if you squint. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been honing its camera-hound skills.

The lunar probe captured images from five of six Apollo sites between July 11 and 15, after first reaching lunar orbit on June 23.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of man's landing on the moon, you can buy yourself a little piece of space history. On July 16, the auction house Bonhams is conducting an auction of lunar memorabilia. The sale includes a number of items that the Apollo 11 mission crew carried onto the moon's surface on the history-making trip. Lunar dust still covers some of the lots.

Included are the checklists that the astronauts used as they proceeded through the landing (estimated price: $125,000-$175,000), flight plans, star charts, models, specimen collection cases, and more. It includes items from the collection of spacecraft engineer Dr. Maxime Faget, and many pieces used and autographed by Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of humankind's first steps on the moon. Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men--one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.

A week after finishing her dissertation on the formation of the moon, Robin Canup danced the lead in Coppelia with the Boulder Ballet. “At the time, it felt like I had a wonderfully full and busy life,” she says, “but I can’t believe now I did it all.” Canup, 35, stopped dancing professionally five years ago. “By that age you’re an old dancer but a young scientist,” she says. Still, there’s an unexpected harmony to her career: Now she studies how moons glide around planets in space.

Even as they embraced him as amiably as suburbanites welcoming a newcomer to the neighborhood, leading X Prize contenders had a message for Burt Rutan: Bring it on.



"Many people seem to be overreacting," says John Carmack, a computer-game legend (Doom, Quake) and founder of Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas. "Burt is somewhat further along than we had hoped. But we still feel we have a solid shot of getting there first."