U.S. President Barack Obama stands alongside (right to left) Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, during a meeting on the 40th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing, held in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday.
Credit: AFP
WASHINGTON DC: As the world marked the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing Monday, astronauts urged Americans to take inspiration from the Apollo program and go back to the Moon and on to Mars.
"We need to go back to the Moon," Eugene Cernan, who was the last man to walk on the Moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, told a news conference held with half a dozen other astronauts from the Apollo program.
"We need to learn a bit more about what we think we know already, we need to establish bases, put new telescopes on the Moon, get prepared to go to Mars. Because the ultimate goal is to go to Mars," Cernan said.
More funding
His call was the latest by now elderly astronauts for increased public backing for NASA's space exploration programs.
On Sunday, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins urged Americans to take the memory of the lunar landing 40 years ago as inspiration to prepare for a space journey to Mars.
"Apollo 11 was a symbol of what a great nation and a great people can do if we work hard and work together," Aldrin told reporters at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The crew became the first to accomplish the dream of ages and walk on the surface of the Moon on July 20, 1969 – an endeavour now remembered at a time when future U.S. dominance in space has become far less certain.
Economic hardship
Forty years ago an estimated 500 million people crowded round televisions and radios to watch Armstrong step onto the Moon's Sea of Tranquillity and declare: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
But the US space agency NASA's ambitious plans to put U.S. astronauts back on the Moon by 2020 and to use it as a springboard to fly on to Mars under the Constellation project are increasingly in doubt – largely because the costs are prohibitive at a time of economic hardship.
The cost of Constellation has been put at about US$150 billion (A$262 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.
