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NASA is helping Google with the moon project (News.com - NASA lifts Google Moon):
NASA said Tuesday that it has added new lunar imagery to Google's Moon Web site, a photographic display of the moon with information graphics about the Apollo landings. The additions are part of an ongoing partnership between NASA and Google, which signed a Space Act agreement in December 2006 to work on Web projects together.
Google continues to sponsor lunar exploration with a new prize to promote commercial exploration of the Moon (Space.com - Google to Sponsor $30 Million Lunar X Prize):
Silicon Valley giant Google Inc. is teaming with the X Prize Foundation to launch a commercial race to the Moon with $30 million in incentives to collect along the way. [...] The goal of the new prize will be to land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of completing several mission objectives, such as: roaming the lunar surface to a distance of at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and relaying video, images and data back to Earth.
This stunning development is sure to capture the imagination of millions of Earth-bound humans as we begin to actively participate in lunar exploration. Brilliant!
Entertainment Weekly reviews a new movie about the original Moon program (Entertainment Weekly - In the Shadow of the Moon):
Watching In the Shadow of the Moon, a transporting documentary in which astronauts from all the Apollo missions recall what it was like to travel to the moon and back (the film features sublime, never-before-released footage of their doing so), I experienced a feeling that came as a shock: not just the usual admiration and ooh-and-ah wonder, but a bedrock nostalgia for an age when technology could seem innocent - when it was infused, on a mass scale, with mystical humanist longing (sorry if I don't get that same feeling from YouTube).
I haven't experienced mystical humanist longing in a long time, so I think I'll check out this documentary.
An important development to note in lunar program hardware (MarketWatch - Boeing wins rocket bid in NASA's lunar program):
Boeing Co. edged a key rival to win a contract to work on the rockets NASA will use to return astronauts to the moon, the U.S. space agency said late Tuesday. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said it chose Boeing as the contractor to design and build the upper stage of the Ares 1 rocket, which will help carry a crew of astronauts into space - over and over, if NASA's plans come through. Ares and the Orion crew vehicle, the conical capsule that will sit atop the rocket, are set to become NASA's next vehicle for space transport when it retires its last space shuttle in 2010.
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