Astronomy, Neil Armstrong | featured news

Space exploration has long been about reaching far off destinations but now there's a race to exploit new frontiers by mining their minerals. When Neil Armstrong first stepped on the Moon in 1969, it was part of a "flags and footprints" strategy to beat the Soviets, a triumph of imagination and innovation, not an attempt to extract precious metals.

Television news didn't seem to fully recognize the importance of the first human to walk on the moon on the weekend he died. In the hours after Armstrong's death was announced, news networks were airing canned programming - jailhouse documentaries, a rerun interview with Rielle Hunter, Mike Huckabee's weekend show. Menacing satellite pictures of Tropical Storm Isaac had much more air time than Armstrong's dusty hops on the lunar surface. Talk of the upcoming GOP national convention sucked up the air.

"It has a stark beauty all its own. It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here." That's how Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon, described what he saw.