40th Anniversary of the First Apollo Moon Landing and You

As I'm sure many of you already know, today is the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing by Apollo 11. To commemorate this truly historic occasion, many publications have entire series of articles discussing the important of the Lunar Landings, what the future of human space flight should be, etc. etc. A small sampling of these are :

• Nature magazine
• New York Times
• Science magazine
• NASA (of course), which includes some amazing articles like this and pictures like this.

(feel free to post your own links below in the comments section). This got me the thinking: What does the Moon landings mean to you? Personally, I feel some ambivalence because I was born after the Apollo program ended, so I (obviously) have no personal memories of the Lunar landings. My first memory of human spaceflight was watching the Challenger launch in elementary school, once it was in the air my teacher let the class go outside for recess, and then when we returned we learned it had exploded. Not exactly the high point of human spaceflight. My interest in Astronomy was sparked more by seeing the night sky for the first time during a family trip to Yellowstone and the amazing picture returned by the Hubble Space Telescope than by dreams of going into space - though I would absolutely do so if offered. My officemate, on the other hand, remembers watching some of the latter Moon landings as a child in Communist China - and these memories are a significant reason why he is an Astronomer.

I wondering if this is lack of personal memories is why I'm not particularly enthusiastic about NASA's current plans to return to the Moon and eventually send people to Mars - which it would be exciting, I worry much more about how the considerable cost will likely end NASA's astronomy satellite program which I use in my research quite a bit. I'd be curious to hear what you think: do you think the worldwide excitement that might be generated by a permanent Moon base is worth the potentially trillion dollar cost? Did the Apollo missions play an important role in science? Do you think the future of humanity really is in spaceflight, and therefore we should start now? Please email me your thoughts or post them below - I'd be very curious to read them.

Happy Apollo 11 anniversary!