Any fan of the space program should recognize quite a few faces roaming around D.C. this week. Last night, the biggest gathering of Apollo astronauts in years arrived at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum for the annual John H. Glenn Lecture featuring the Apollo 11 crew, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, along with NASA's first Flight Director, Chris Kraft, and of course, astronaut and Senator John Glenn himself. The audience was filled with other Apollo astronauts, as well as the STS-125 crew that flew the space shuttle Atlantis to repair the Hubble Telescope in May.

Today, as you may know, is the 40th anniversary of the day Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the Moon. Google has been preparing a new venture to celebrate the mission, officially announcing Google Moon 5.0 this morning at the Newseum alongside Aldrin, brand new NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, JAXA's (the Japanese space program) Washington, D.C. Director Yoshinori Yoshimura, along with many of the Google team.

A downloadable program, Moon in Google Earth has nearly all of the same features as Google Earth, plus many more that it doesn't. Although the programming venture began with existing photos of the Moon -- many taken by the Apollo astronauts -- it's being updated constantly with new data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched June 18 and began sending up-close images back to Earth four days later. Google Moon will take you on 3D tours of every Apollo mission, including "street views" that feature stitched photos of the landscape, photos or animations of the artifacts both the U.S. and Russia left there, and "guided tours" that follow the astronaut's paths. Additionally, archived video and audio footage is available, including some narration added by Buzz Aldrin specifically for the project.

The speakers on hand today at the Newseum, as well as the astronauts in yesterday's Air & Space lecture, spent all their time talking about the future of space exploration, rather than re-living the achievements of the past (in fact, they'd all appreciate today's Someecard tribute). Google bills their new platform as a next step in the space program, and hopes it will play host to a wealth of new discoveries via the "democratization of information," the way that Google Earth has -- citing its role in, among other things, finding damaged areas after Hurricane Katrina or tracking the 2007 San Diego wildfires.

Through its partnership with NASA, along with JAXA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and others, Google wants to, as author and space historian Andrew Chaikin said this morning, "Open an entirely new chapter in space exploration -- and we all get to go along for the ride this time."

One can't talk about the past two days of speakers without mentioning, as each one did, that NASA is at a crossroads. The space shuttle program is scheduled to end in 2010 and the Constellation program to return Americans to the Moon and eventually (though no timeline has actually been set) to Mars, urged by President George W. Bush in 2004, is suffering from engineering design problems and delays with the Ares rockets, not to mention harsh critiques from space policy experts across the board on the rocket designs, mission focus, and proposed timelines (it's unlikely the program will get humans to the Moon again before 2020, making one wonder why it's taking almost twice as long to figure out how to get us there the second time than the first time). President Obama has ordered a review of the entire program, to be published in August, which could end up meaning significant budget cuts.

Both Kraft and Aldrin used their podium time to ask the current officeholder to look back to President John F. Kennedy and what we managed to accomplish in ten years, and as Kraft put it, remember that NASA is the "best return on investment this country has ever had," via the technological advances that came out of developing Gemini, Apollo, and the current Space Shuttle program. Can we keep advancing by focusing our energies on further exploration? "Yes, we can!", said Aldrin.

While NASA figures out its future, we can still get inspired by the past, so be sure to load We Choose the Moon this afternoon to hear the Moon landing audio archive played in real time (it happens just after 4 p.m. today), then download Google Moon and see the new photos recently taken by the LRO of the Lunar Module that Armstrong and Aldrin stepped out of 40 years ago today.

Filed in Miscellaneous and tagged astronauts, astronomy, google, google earth, google moon, nasa, smithsonian, space

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