July 20, 1999 will be the thirtieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong's "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind". For the record the first word spoken from the surface of the moon was "Houston". As in "Houston, this is Tranquility Base".
On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a man first set foot on another celestial body.
Six hours after landing at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining), Neil A. Armstrong took the "Small Step" into our greater future when he stepped off the Lunar Module, named "Eagle," onto the surface of the Moon, from which he could look up and see Earth in the heavens as no one had done before him.
He was shortly joined by "Buzz" Aldrin, and the two astronauts spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned 46 pounds of lunar rocks. Their liftoff from the surface of the moon was (partially) captured on a TV camera they left behind, and they successfully docked with Michael Collins, patiently orbiting the cold but no longer lifeless moon alone in the Command Module "Columbia."
Take a look at the Apollo 11 graphics, the Apollo 11 factsheet and One Giant Leap (CNN Special Report: Apollo 11 at 30)
NASA has targeted targeted late July 19 for the launching of its $2.7 billion Chandra X-ray Observatory from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the shuttle Columbia.
Chandra was developed to observe the highest energy events in the universe and could help astronomers locate the mysterious dark matter that may make up much of the cosmos, as well as explain activities around supermassive black holes.
Named for the late Indian-born theoretical astrophysicist and Nobel prize winner Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Chandra is a companion to the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991. The last of the observatories in the series, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, is slated for launch in 2001.
But the Chandra it seems has had almost as many problems as the Mir. Setbacks during the past year for the Chandra flight added $53 million to the mission's hefty price tag, but space agency managers vowed to correct every difficulty before approving the launch.
The latest difficulty arose after the April 9 launching of an Air Force Titan 4 rocket with a missile warning satellite. The Titan's upper stage rocket, which is identical to the Chandra's propulsion system, failed to separate into its two components, and the military satellite was lost.
NASA awaited the outcome of a classified Air Force investigation into the expensive mishap before electing to proceed with the Chandra mission.
"We decided to do a variety of things based on the information we've gotten and made corrections on our (propulsion system)," said Fred Wojtalik, NASA's Chandra program manager.
At 50,162 pounds and 57 feet, the Chandra observatory and its propulsion system is the largest shuttle payload. Most of the mass -- 30,600 pounds -- belongs to the propulsion system.
The satellite's rocketry is essential to boosting the X-ray observatory to its final destination, an elliptical orbit that will range between 6,200 miles and 87,000 miles above the Earth, a good third of the way to the moon at its furthermost point.
Columbia's five-member crew will be led by veteran astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a crew of space travelers, a mission on the 30th anniversary of the first moonwalk.
Eileen Collins said it was about time, and that such an opportunity had "been a long time coming."
"Women helped pioneer aviation," Collins told a news briefing, adding that starting around 1930, "women were not given the same opportunities as men."
"NASA is very serious about giving all Americans a chance to fly in space. But to be an astronaut you can't just walk into this job. You have to prepare yourself," Collins said.
Although barriers had started to fall, Collins said more young women needed to choose technical and scientific careers before women could be fully represented in space. "If you don't have large numbers of women apply, it will be hard to select large numbers of women," she said.
Women have flown in space since the 1960s and their presence in space has been routine since the 1980s, but Collins will be the first woman in charge.
The Soviet Union sent a woman alone into space in the early 1960s, but she flew on a spacecraft controlled from the ground. Collins, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, flew the shuttle (the first woman to do so) in missions in 1995 and 1997 to Russia's Mir space station.
The traditional route to command at NASA is to fly military combat aircraft, which women were not allowed to do until the mid-1970s.
Her crew consists of pilot Jeffery Ashby and mission specialists Steven Hawley, Catherine Coleman and Michel Tognini, a French astronaut. "We're very excited about this flight," she said.