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As a child I was fascinated by astronomy and space, and I hoped to live to see the day when men would travel to the Moon. In 1969 I managed to snag a summer high school internship at Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Thus I was able to be an extremely small part of one of the greatest human achievements when, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to land and walk on the lunar surface. I was like a kid in a solar-system-sized candy store! I was able to watch...

On July 20, 1969, astronauts stepped onto the moon and planted an American flag—not to claim the moon but simply to commemorate the U.S. role in the first moon landing. Forty years later a Nevada entrepreneur says he owns the moon and that he's interim president of the first known galactic government.Dennis Hope, head of the Lunar Embassy Corporation, has sold real estate on the moon and other planets to about 3.7 million people so far.As his customer base grew, he said, buyers wanted assurances that their property rights would be protected. So Hope started his own government in 2004,...

The world is celebrating the amazing journey that Apollo 11 made to the Moon 40 years ago. But few realise that an early bid to reach the Moon was launched from England, way back in the 17th century. Wilkins and Hooke aboard their spaceship Incredible as it may seem, one of the greatest scientific minds of the time, Dr John Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, was planning his own lunar mission four centuries ago around the time of the English Civil War. It wasn't hot air either. Inspired by the great voyages of discovery around the globe...

The moon may have been the entire world for a day for Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin 40 years ago, but today he hopes the United States and the world set their sights on a far grander goal: Spreading humanity to Mars and perhaps asteroids and comets.

Forty years ago this week, science fiction writers were media celebrities—at least for a few hours. When Neil Armstrong stepped on to the surface of the moon on July 21, 1969, his “giant leap for mankind” was not just a fulfillment of President Kennedy’s promise of a lunar expedition before decade’s end. It also validated the starry-eyed dreams of a legion of pulp fiction writers. Long before NASA was founded, the ABCs of sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke) and others of their profession had been chronicling the exploration of the universe in works of imaginative fiction. The moon landing was their...

Whoops. There went Neil. NASA admitted Thursday that it erased the original recordings of the first men landing on the moon as a cost-cutting measure back in an era when live TV was the media mode of choice. Hollywood has come to the rescue, however. The space agency will pay film restoration company Lowry Digital $230,000 to cobble together pivotal scenes of the Apollo 11 moonwalk gleaned from old, forgotten TV and archive sources

NEW DELHI — India's only satellite orbiting the moon came close to failure after overheating but scientists improvised to save it and have achieved more than 90 percent of the mission's objectives, an official said Friday. The launch of Chandrayaan-1 in October 2008 put India in an elite group to have lunar missions along with the U.S., Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China. But on May 16, the satellite lost a critical instrument called the star sensor, the Indian Space Research Organization's chief Madhavan Nair told reporters. The sensor helps the satellite stay oriented so its cameras and...

Is the U.S. flag planted on the moon 40 years ago still standing? That's just one of many questions researchers hope will be answered this year by new pictures of old Apollo landing sites.

Moon Landing Re-created and re-broadcast in real-time.

On Thursday, you can watch online in real time, 40 years later real time, the launch of Apollo 11 and the moonwalk by Michael Jackson....er, I mean Neil Armstrong. http://wechoosethemoon.org/

NASA has tantalisingly announced that it will release "greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk" on Thursday. The agency reports (http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/jul/HQ_M09-125_Newseum_Apollo_tapes.html): "The release will feature 15 key moments from Neil Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's historic moonwalk using what is believed to be the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years." We assume the footage in question is gleaned from the original magnetic tapes recorded by the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and which belatedly turned up (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/29/moon_landing_tapes/) in a storage...

ECSTATIC space officials at Nasa could be about to unveil one of their most stunning discoveries for 40 years — new and amazingly clear footage of the first moon landing.The release of the new images next month could be one of the most talked about events of the summer.The television images the world has been used to seeing of the historic moment when Neil Armstrong descended down a ladder onto the moon’s surface in 1969 is grainy, blurry and dark.The following scenes, in which the astronauts move around the lunar lander, are so murky it is difficult to make out...

Liquid nitrogen, vegetable steamers, Macintosh workstations and old, refrigerator-size tape drives. These are just some of the tools a new breed of Space Age archeologists is using to sift through the digital debris from the early days of NASA, mining the information in ways unimaginable when it was first gathered four decades ago. At stake is data that could show Earth's risk of an asteroid strike, shed light on global warming and -- perhaps -- even satisfy those who think the moon landings were a hoax. The most visible of the archeologists is arguably Dennis Wingo, head of Skycorp Inc.,...

CAPE CANAVERAL — The aerospace giants contracted to help build NASA's next-generation spaceships are quietly hedging their bets and stepping back from the Ares rockets that the agency has staked its future on after the shuttle retires next year. In recent weeks, Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Boeing Co. have reached out to NASA officials, lawmakers and a presidentially appointed panel reviewing America's human-spaceflight plan, expressing a willingness to change plans or offering alternatives to the rockets that until recently they strongly advocated.

US ambitions to send astronauts back to the moon as a prelude to missions to Mars have been put in doubt by budgetary constraints 40 years after man's triumphant landing on Earth's nearest neighbor. After the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003, former president George W. Bush decided to phase out the shuttle flights by 2003 and set a more ambitious mandate for America in space. Launched in 2004, the so-called Constellation program aims to take Americans back to the moon by 2020 to use as a launch pad for manned voyages to Mars.

Jim Scotti takes lunar landing conspiracy theories personally because he took the Apollo missions and Apollo 11 seriously when he was growing up. Scotti followed in the footsteps of the heroic astronauts of Apollo 11 by becoming a space explorer, albeit an Earthbound one. He is a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab in Tucson, where he works on the Spacewatch Project.

Since the crew of Apollo 17 returned from the moon in December 1972, no human has ever left low-Earth orbit. Five space shuttles, scores of Russian Soyuz capsules, the International Space Station, and more than 450 men and women have left the Earth since Apollo, but all have been bound to a small shell of space just outside our atmosphere.

Apollo was momentous in a way that Yuri Gagarin's first, heroic orbit could never have been. Gagarin had circled the Earth in 92 minutes in 1961. He had travelled 24,000 miles in an hour and a half; he had made history; he had confirmed Soviet space supremacy; he had done a thing that many thought could never be done. But two things separated him from the Apollo team eight years later.

WASHINGTON – Like a car salesman pushing a luxury vehicle that the customer no longer can afford, NASA has pulled out of its back pocket a deal for a cheaper ride to the moon. It won't be as powerful, and its design is a little dated. Think of it as a base-model Ford station wagon instead of a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade. Officially, the space agency is still on track with a 4-year-old plan to spend $35 billion to build new rockets and return astronauts to the moon in several years. However, a top NASA manager is floating a cut-rate alternative...

America, Japan, China and India have all begun what the Wall Street Journal calls ‘The new race for the moon’ (1). No doubt their motives aren’t wholly pure; but it is those who attack the whole idea of lunar missions who most deserve criticism right now, for they too are in the ascendant. A popular, of-the-moment example is the new anti-capitalist movie, Moon. Describing it as a warning ‘that couldn’t be more timely’, a contributor to the influential online magazine Slate insists, simply, ‘Stay off the moon!’ One thing unites the critics of lunar exploration. Forty years after man first...

ECSTATIC space officials at Nasa could be about to unveil one of their most stunning discoveries for 40 years — new and amazingly clear footage of the first moon landing. The release of the new images next month could be one of the most talked about events of the summer. The television images the world has been used to seeing of the historic moment when Neil Armstrong descended down a ladder onto the moon’s surface in 1969 is grainy, blurry and dark. The following scenes, in which the astronauts move around the lunar lander, are so murky it is difficult...

The total solar eclipse of July 22 2009 will be visible across south-east Asia and the western Pacific. This will be a spectacular total eclipse, lasting over 6½ minutes at maximum and visible to millions of people over a path up to 258 km wide. The total eclipse begins just off the coast of India at 00:51:17 UT on July 22, and ends in Polynesia at 04:19:26 UT on July 22. The maximum eclipse is at 02:35:21 UT on July 22, when the total phase will last a stunning 6 minutes and 39 seconds. The partial eclipse will be visible...

Michael Jackson, famously known as the ‘Moonwalker´ for his legendary dance moves, now has a crater of the moon named after himself. In an out-of-the-world tribute to the ‘King of Pop´ the Lunar Republic Society named the moon crater after Jackson’s name, Contactmusic reported. The crater, previously named Posidonius J, is located in the Moon’s Lake of Dreams and is close to a 1,200-acre parcel, which was purchased by the pop star. Jackson, died last month at the age of 50 after a suspected cardiac arrest. His fans and family members bid their final farewell to the pop legend in...

US space experts are downsizing plans to send astronauts back to the moon and possibly to Mars amid fears of funding cuts by the Obama administration. Forty years after astronauts first walked on the moon, Nasa, the US space agency, is officially committed to a $35 billion (£22 billion) plan instituted by President George W. Bush to build the first of a new generation of manned rockets that can return to the planet by 2020. However, the new president has appointed an independent panel to review America's costly manned space programme, called Constellation, and make recommendations by the end of...

Nasa astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, has urged the world to forget about returning to our nearest satellite and head to Mars instead. 'Why do we want to go to go back to the Moon?' he asked. 'Some nations want to go for prestige to say they are 'first' in space exploration in the 21st century and they want Nasa to compete with them.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has beamed back its first snaps of the Moon - images from the Mare Nubium region captured by the spacecraft's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, aka LROC: LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University explained: "Our first images were taken along the moon's terminator - the dividing line between day and night - making us initially unsure of how they would turn out. Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. ... The LROC is in fact three cameras: Two narrow-angle instruments, designed to capture "high-resolution, black-and-white...

NASA's mission to bomb the Moon NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet. The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole. Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected. . NASA's mission to bomb the Moon NASA will...

New imagery of old Apollo touchdown spots, from the European Space Agency's (ESA) SMART-1 probe, might put to rest conspiratorial thoughts that U.S. astronauts didn't go the distance and scuff up the lunar landscape. NASA carried out six piloted landings on the Moon in the time period 1969 through 1972... Bernard Foing, Chief Scientist of the ESA Science Program... told SPACE.com that the SMART-1 orbiter circling the Moon has already covered the Apollo 11, 16, 17 landing sites, as well as spots where the former Soviet Union's Luna 16 and Luna 20 automated vehicles plopped down... Foing said that each...

Last Thursday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent two probes to the moon in search of a possible site for a manned lunar station. Both China and the U.S. have announced that they plan to send manned missions to the moon around 2020. India and Japan are not far behind, launching their own unmanned probes to the moon and laying out their timetables for sending men there. Will we see a pileup on the moon around 2020? The idea of a traffic jam on the moon would have seemed preposterous to President John Kennedy when he announced the...

Japan's Selene satellite has been sending us amazing HD footage of the surface of the moon for a couple of months now, but on June 11th, it finally crashed into the surface. And its final video might be its best. Unfortunately, the crash itself happens just over the line into the dark side of the moon, but you can see its final decent and just how damned close it was to the surface. It's incredible. It seems like it's mere feet above the surface, showing a level of detail never before seen. Amazing Video at link

Enlarge ImageSurprise! The IBEX spacecraft, preparing to explore deep space (inset), accidentally made an important discovery about the moon.Credit: Southwest Research Institute Scientists probing the outer reaches of our solar system have hit upon an unusual phenomenon much closer to home. Instruments aboard a NASA spacecraft have detected fast-moving hydrogen atoms emanating from the moon. The atoms, which originated as protons from the sun, may help scientists study the lunar surface and other solar system objects in greater detail than believed possible. The moon is continuously being pelted by hazardous radiation. Most of it comes from the solar wind,...

Nasa scientists are preparing to launch a space mission from Cape Canaveral carrying a missile that will fire a hole deep in the surface of the moon. The aim is to see whether any traces of water will be revealed by the disruption caused to the planet's surface. Nasa will analyse the space cloud caused by the explosion for any sign of water or vapour. Scientists expect the impact to blast out a huge cloud of dust, gas and vaporized water ice at least 6 miles high - making it visible from Earth. If the search is successful it could...

Say this for the U.S. space program: we may have spent the past 40 years mostly ignoring the moon, but when we go back, we go back with a bang. Later today — if weather conditions and hardware permit — NASA will launch its much anticipated and deeply imaginative Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the first American spacecraft of any kind to make a lunar trip since 1999. Not only will the LRO help us study the moon in greater detail than ever before, it should also give us our first look at the six Apollo landing sites since we abandoned...

n the new film Moon, working on the lunar surface is an unglamourous affair. Sam Bell, played by Sam Rockwell, toils alone in a stark-white base, working as a glorified handyman for Lunar Industries, an ominously glossy corporation that extracts helium-3 from the lunar surface to fuel fusion reactors back on Earth. In this vision of the future, helium-3 supplies the majority of the world's energy needs, a scenario that is not entirely outlandish, as some suspect the moon contains a wealth of the material (see The mine on the moon). While the cost of retrieving the material may be...

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite are ready for launch aboard an Atlas V rocket from at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station today. The spacecraft are scheduled to lift off together with three attempts possible at 5:12 p.m., 5:22 p.m. and 5:32 p.m. EDT. If launch slips to Friday, June 19, the launch opportunities would be 6:41 p.m., 6:51 p.m. and 7:01 p.m.

When the next generation of lunar astronauts step foot on the Moon in the years ahead, the definitive travel guide compiled by an instrument-laden spacecraft launching this week will detail the best and worst places to go and the risks the crews could face. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is NASA's trailblazer to create detailed maps of the terrain, plot out potential landing sites, identify natural resources that could be exploited and characterize the radiation conditions that astronauts can expect.

There is a Japanese lunar orbiter named Kaguya that is scheduled to crash into the moon today at about 2:30 pm ET. Scientists hope to learn something about the moon’s composition by observing the debris that is kicked up. In many traditions, including astrology, the moon represents the feminine. It is the yin, the intuitive, the emotions. Women are connected to the moon by their menstrual cycles while they are fertile, and all beings, including the earth herself, are affected by the pull of the tides. Purposefully crashing something into the moon just to watch what happens is akin to...

Entrepreneur Wants Kids to Have Tea on the Moon By Jeremy Hsu Staff Writer posted: 10 June 2009 09:43 am ET Nearly 40 years after Americans first set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969 with NASA's historic Apollo 11 flight, a host of private rocketeers are hoping to follow to win a $30 million prize. Here, SPACE.com looks at Chandah, one of 17 teams competing in the Google Lunar X Prize: Team Chandah began with a Pakistani community leader from 100 years ago predicting that descendants would have tea on the moon.

STENNIS SPACE CENTER — A massive steel structure jutting into the sky not far from Interstate 10 is sending the world a message: NASA is taking the next step in hurtling humans back to the moon. Structural work was recently finished on the giant A-3 test stand. Now, things are moving further along in the construction phase. In April, Steel Erector Inc., of Lafayette, La., put the final steel beam on top of the towering test stand and bolted the beam in place, bearing the signatures of project team members. “We’re now 235 feet closer to going back to...

The results of misbegotten space policy choices over the past decades are finally coming to a head in the new administration. The cans have been kicked down the road as far as possible with regard to when to retire the space shuttle, and the future of NASA’s human space flight program in general and the International Space Station (ISS) in particular. Indeed, we’re reaching a point of no return. Fortunately, at least some uncertainty has been reduced with recent reports that the U.S. is moving toward a decision to continue supporting ISS through 2020, despite the fact that it will...

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Indian space mission’s next dream is to set up a base station on the moon so that space vehicles for onward journey to the Mars can be assembled and launched from there, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), G. Madhavan Nair, has said. Addressing students of ISRO’s Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) at their annual celebrations here on Friday, Dr. Nair asked them to have this dream in their mind. He asked them to think big, not just retrace the path already trekked by space science and technology, but look to where the...

ENTEBBE, Uganda (AFP) - Africans must travel to the moon to investigate what developed nations have been doing in outer space, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said Saturday. "The Americans have gone to the moon. And the Russians. The Chinese and Indians will go there soon. Africans are the only ones who are stuck here," Museveni said, addressing a meeting of the Uganda Law Society in Entebbe. "We must also go there and say: 'What are you people doing up here?'."

About 24 hours from now, the crescent moon will occult Venus. The event will be visible from the western part of the US. If conditions are right, it could be an interesting event!

Earth Day may fall later this week, but as far as former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other UFO enthusiasts are concerned, the real story is happening elsewhere. Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, asserted Monday that extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the United States and other governments. He delivered his remarks during an appearance at the National Press Club following the conclusion of the fifth annual X-Conference, a meeting of UFO activists and researchers studying the possibility of alien life forms. Mankind has long wondered if we're "alone...

This high tide is bound to wash away more than just your sand castle. A new study has found that bulges in Earth's crust — solid Earth tides — trigger about 1 percent of earthquakes. As Earth and the moon grind through their gravitational ballet, our planet gets tugged hard near the equator. The force is so strong that as the moon passes overhead each day, it pulls Earth's surface up 11.8 inches.

Russian space officials are to select the winning proposal for a new rocket intended to carry cosmonauts on missions to the Moon.This will mark the first time since 1964 that the Russian space program has made the Moon its main objective. It will be only the second time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Moscow has endorsed the development of a new space vehicle.

HAMPTON, Va., March 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA is working on the building blocks to return humans to the Moon by 2020, then send them onto Mars. It's part of the national Vision for Space Exploration established five years ago. Just what is America's plan and is it the right one? Four international experts will address those questions and others in a special Moon-Mars Forum, March 17, from 7-9 p.m. at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton.

GORDON Brown last night urged America to use the drive that put man on the Moon to save the Earth. The PM called on the US to “seize the moment” and lead the world out of economic crisis with green technology. Mr Brown forecast the global economy could DOUBLE — if America, Britain and the EU worked together for a “Global New Deal”. He warned America not to close its doors to foreign competition — saying protectionism would “protect no one”.

The Moon has been neglected by space scientists and astronomers alike since the Apollo days, but now we want to go back. Paul D Spudis explains what motivates the new vision of lunar exploration Three spacecraft are currently orbiting the Moon, Chang’e-1 from China, Kaguya from Japan and Chandrayaan-1 from India. The American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will join them later this year. Russia is developing lunar rover hardware, for itself and for other countries. In Europe, both Germany and the UK are contemplating their own lunar missions, both outside the boundaries of the European Space Agency, to which they both...