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Future lunar mission: Don't be over the moon

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-20 07:14

WASHINGTON: The United States will today mark the 40th anniversary of its conquest of the moon, a triumph of scientific endeavour now remembered at a time when US dominance in space is increasingly uncertain.

President Barack Obama kicks off 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," said astronaut Neil Armstrong as he stepped down from the lunar lander on July 20, 1969, as an estimated 500 million people on Earth crowded around televisions and radios.

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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.

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 $150 billion, but estimates for the Ares I launcher to put the project into orbit have skyrocketed from $26 billion in 2006 to $44 billion last year.

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