Resources:

http://www.moon-watch.com/ source for pictures and good history of moon landings.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/vplanet.html scientific data and pictures

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/luna.html very good web site with pictures, a well thought out site and excellent connected information

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html interesting look at the moon's phases.

http://www.asi.org/ Artemis project for individuals to go to and visit the moon

http://www.ari.net/back2moon.html a site that discusses returning to the moon.

Though the moon orbits our planet and is only about a quarter million miles away it remains pretty much just an object to decorate our evening sky rather than part of our awareness and reality. But it has not always been so. Thirty-one years ago this past August two Americans walked on the moon and we watched them and lived the experience with them. The decision to send a space mission to the moon was perhaps purely political as John F. Kennedy said “we choose to go to the moon” and launched the whole project in a scientific and technical race with the Soviet Union. Clearly it was a better plan than fighting an all out nuclear war and yet on the ground the steps toward and deadly war of attrition had already begun in South East Asia. The venture to put a man on the moon was in so many ways just a matter of hype but it was really a significant step. By moving off our planet and exploring the closest body in the universe our species made its first big move toward what is clearly our destiny. We were in Vancouver the summer of sixty-nine and I took the polaroid image you see at the bottom of this page to commemorate the event for me. I also used my new super8 camera to record those first steps of man on the moon (we had no VCR in 69) but we shared that experience, our hearts and minds were with the two men and the spirit of us was there. The question is, why did this marvellous exploration end decades ago and have we religated ourselves to remain on this planet by not going forth with that great venture. The space station, now manned is such a tentative step and the idea of venturing to Mars is more fiction than science. What is holding us back? It would appear that intellectually we as a life form have not reached the stage where we together see this exploration as important. For humans to want to leave this planet and go beyond we require an enormous level of agreement. Kennedy with his charm and popularity was able to marshal the forces that would get the thing going but since then few leaders would be so bold. Kennedy’s death had a pretty profound influence on leaders taking big chances. But there will come a time when we as a united species will demand that we go from our planet and seek new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before.