Future lunar mission: Don't be over the moon

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.

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.

The mounting costs prompted Obama, soon after he took office, to order a close examination of the program. A blue-ribbon panel of experts headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine is due to issue recommendations in late August.

"With a few exceptions, we have the technology or the knowledge that we could go to Mars if we wanted with humans," Augustine said recently. "We could put a telescope on the moon if we wanted," he said.

"The technology is by and large there. It boils down to what can we afford?" he asked.

Currently NASA's budget is too small to pay for Constellation's Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, as well as the Ares I and Ares V launchers needed to put the craft in orbit.

With a space exploration budget of $6 billion in 2009, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a former astronaut, said: "NASA simply can't do the job it's been given."

Several events are planned around the country to mark today's historic anniversary. Celebrations will be held from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Apollo 11 mission blasted off to mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and at the Air and Space Museum in the US capital.

To recapture one of mankind's most dramatic moments, NASA last week unveiled restored video footage of key moments from the Apollo 11 mission found after a three-year search through some 45,000 video cassettes in its analog archives.

NASA has also upgraded its Internet website to mark the anniversary, which was largely ignored when the 30th anniversary rolled by in July 1999.

And the record of America's crowning achievement remains visible on the moon in the shape of astronauts' footprint.

"The first footprints on the moon will be there for a million years," reads a posting on a NASA website. "There is no wind to blow them away."

(Agencies)