That President was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Of course, he also wanted to go to the Moon to beat the Soviet Union and win a political war, but there were a thousand more reasons to make that trip. All of them were good. As a result of his political will, the Apollo program became the most complex, most advanced, most successful, most beneficial technology endeavour ever taken by the United States of America.

It put the country decades ahead in every aspect of technology, and its effects, the technologies that came directly out of it, are now an indispensable part of our world: From the development of new metals and microprocessors, to clothing and medicine, the Apollo program touched every single aspect of our lives. Those developments are responsible for your smartphone, your desktop computer, your television set and even your winter underpants.

But most importantly, the Apollo program inspired generations of kids to become scientists and engineers, indirectly pushing technology even further. Humans were going to the fucking Moon! How cool is that? I can’t think of a more inspiring challenge than to conquer the stars, and those kids thought the same.

Inspiring a new generation
That inspiration made American universities thrive with new talent eager to push technology forward. We – not only America, but the entire world – are still enjoying the benefits that those students and the ones who followed brought to all of us decades after Apollo ended. Those kids went to work at IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Boeing, Lockheed, and the thousands of high tech companies that bring us the amazing technology that we use on a daily basis.

So while some people may want to convince you that President Obama’s decision to fundamentally kill NASA’s manned space program is a great move for the future of space, I’m here to tell you that all that is bullshit.

First, it’s an excuse for a President who has failed to deliver on his promise of a better space program. His proposal is not better than what we had before. Actually, it’s only good for the private space sector which, incidentally, for the most part is just reinventing the wheel that NASA and the Soviet Union space organisation invented decades ago.

Even if you agree that the Constellation program wasn’t going anywhere – many people disagree, like those who created the video above – you can’t have the US manned spaceflight program disappear in favour of private space cabs to Earth’s orbit. Even Burt Rutan – the poster child of private spaceflight, creator of Spaceshipone and Spaceshiptwo – agrees that this is an incredibly bad idea:

That is not a “NASA plan”; it is the proposed budget from the White House. It will likely be revised by the Congress. I am for NASA doing either true Research, or doing forefront Exploration, with taxpayer dollars.

Ares/Orion is more of a Development program than a Research program, so I am not depressed to see it disappear. I am concerned to see NASA manned spaceflight disappear, since they provided world leadership in the 60s and part of the 70s. The result was America’s universities being the leader in cience/Engineering PhDs.

Many American kids will be depressed by the thought that our accomplishments will not be continued and thus America will fall deeper away from our previous leadership in Engineering/Science/Math. I believe our future success depends on our ability to motivate our youth.

I would support a restructuring of goals and funding so NASA can be allowed to perform like the 60s on space Research and on Exploration. There is not a shred of evidence that the President sees any value in those goals.

Rutan made those comments yesterday, and I can’t agree more with him. It’s good to see him – of all people – saying this out loud, especially while the rest of space private companies are gloating about how Obama’s “think small” plan will increase their benefits in a big way.

The greater good
In a world of fast forward, short attention spans and materialism above all things, we need humans in space. Not just tweeting from orbit. But out there, on the Moon and Mars. And if the United States can’t do this on its own, that’s OK. In fact, that would be perfect: NASA should work together with the European Space Agency, the Russian Federal Space Agency, JAXA, and anyone who wants to achieve the greater good and really push humanity forward.

And yes, we need the satellites and the probes and the telescopes, absolutely, but you can’t replace humans with probes. Not because humans would do a better job, but because robots photographing things is not the same as being there. Being there like everyone on Earth arrived to the Moon when Neil Armstrong put his foot on it.

From a bean counter point of view, if you do it right, the economical and technological benefits will be as great as those brought by Apollo, now and in the future. From the point of view of anyone who thinks that the world is about more than counting beans, the benefits are even more obvious than that. The fact is that photographs taken by robots neither push technology forward nor inspire entire generations or bring economical and technological benefits that reverberate through decades to come. That’s what the humans in Apollo did.

Maybe Obama needs to watch the entire JFK’s We Need to Go to the Moon speech, at the Rice Stadium in Houston, TX in the fall of 1962, and remember that the reason the United States chose to go to the moon:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Kennedy ended that speech with this:

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

I can’t add anything else to that.

HTC hasn’t been too sure on whether the HD2 will be upgraded with WinMo 7, but there’s talk of a new HTC phone in town – the Obsession, or Diamond3, which Boy Genius Report believes will be offered on AT&T and T-Mobile. LG is also readying a phone for the big Microsoft push, called the Apollo – which WMPowerUser and Let’s Go Digital are claiming will have an enormous amount of spec.

It’s all pretty dubious, to say the least – a WinMo phone with a 10-megapixel camera and 720p video recording? Let’s Go Digital has published a picture of the supposed device, which looks just like the Viewty Smart running Windows Mobile 6.5. I honestly don’t know what to think about WinMo 7 anymore, just make it all go away while I lie down and whimper for a while. [Digitimes]

Geez. These modules are full-scale, custom-everything, and can be based on specific Apollo missions. I really don’t think I’ve wanted a toy this much since the first Lego Mindstorms set. [Space Toys via Geekologie]

Very few Gizmodo readers were even born when Rockwell painted his last Saturday Evening Post cover, but we all know them. You hear that name and suddenly you can picture those overly detailed, cartoonishly dramatic but ultimately kinda corny depictions of American life. Well, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, written and compiled by Ron Schick, has given me immense newfound respect for the man, for the meticulous photography, the real people and the unintentionally hilarious DIY props and sets that he required to make his painted fantasies of Americana come true.

The book is not about painting. Rockwell’s oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell’s photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It’s almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country’s collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.

The photos are as memorable as the paintings: There’s a little boy whose feet are propped up on thick books, a walking still-life; there’s a naked lady who ended up a mermaid in a lobster trap; there are men and women in various states of frustration, concentration and bliss, whose facial expressions defined Rockwell’s style. These were mostly not agency models, but friends and neighbours who were pleased to help out, but not always thrilled by the finished product.

Since Rockwell was one of the most commercially successful artists of all time, you can imagine the rights to all of his images (paintings and photos) are carefully managed. The publisher was kind enough to let us show you the book cover plus two additional pairings, below. I encourage you to buy the book ($US26.40 at Amazon) — what you see here is just a quick lick of the spoon:

Going and Coming, 1947
You’ll notice the book jacket shows a painting of a family embarking on a summer vacation—Granny, Spot and all—coupled with a photo of a similar scene with far less action. There’s a kid sticking out of the car in both, but many family members are missing. This is because they were photographed separately, in Rockwell’s studio, and painted in where needed. (You’ll also notice that the photo on the jacket is reversed—the car was pointed in the other direction but I suppose that wouldn’t have looked as cool.)

Circus, 1955
What I liked about this picture is that you get to see how ridiculous Rockwell’s sets could often be. He needed real faces, but he could fill in the rest. Hence piling chairs up on top of an old desk to simulate bleachers at the circus. Good thing nobody fell off the back and sued ole Rocky for millions—that twine used to hold the little girl’s chair in place doesn’t look OSHA certified. If the geeky looking fellow in the front looks familiar, it’s because Rockwell himself served as a model for his paintings all the time.

The Final Impossibility: Man’s Tracks on the Moon, 1969
Yep, here’s proof that the moon landing was faked. At least, Rockwell’s commemorative portrait of it was. NASA loved his work, so they loaned him spacesuits and helmets whenever he wanted, and for this, he got permission to photograph his models moonwalking around an Apollo Lunar Lander, with a black tarp doubling for infinity and beyond. Remember, this is when Apollo was new and the Cold War was in full swing, so getting access to the latest NASA toys took clout.

Behind the Camera covers many aspects of Rockwell that I had not known about previously. He was an outspoken civil rights activist, and many of his paintings dealt with race relations. There is a painting of two murdered men, one black and one white, accompanied by an almost absurd photo of two very alive guys lying side by side, eyes closed, on a carpet. There’s another painting of a little black girl being walked to school by US Marshals, and the many different closeup shots Rockwell required to paint the extreme detail of the tense, potent—and fabricated—moment.

I wish I could run a gallery of 100 shots from this book, because each page startled me in a different way. Meeting the real people behind the paintings, and learning that every painting was composed of masterfully planned photographs—always black and white, since the artist let his imagination add the color—I will no longer take Norman Rockwell for granted. In fact, I’m gonna kinda worship him from now on. [Amazon sales page; Little, Brown product page]

And they should be, because Charles Moss Duke was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 16 in 1972. He landed with mission commander John W. Young at the Descartes Highlands, which is what makes this photo so special: It’s still there, untouched, unperturbed, exactly in the same position as he left it before taking a snapshot of it with his Hasselblad 70mm film camera.

I didn’t know about this fantastic photo until a couple of days ago, ignorant that I am. Following the advice of my friend Adán—who is a space exploration fanboy like I am—I bought an amazing book called Full Moon. It shows the trip to the moon through 128 brunch-bacon-crispy photographs, many of them giant four-page spreads containing fascinating panoramas. All clean, pitch black background, no text. Like the silence of space.

Full Moon is not a new book: It was curated and published in 1999 by Michael Light. It contains the first and only digital scans of the Apollo missions’ original camera film. See, when these images returned from space, NASA copied them then stored the original film right away for future scanning. The vaults were opened for Light, who went through all of them, selected what he thought was the best, scanned them using the best digital equipment available, created the panoramas when needed, and printed this book. The quality is so perfect, and the selection so good, that I can’t recommend it highly enough.

So there I was, sitting in amazement, slowly flipping through the amazing views, and I found this. It instantly caught my attention. The idea of leaving such a happy photo in the surface of such a inhospitable place filled me with a mix of happiness, sadness and much nostalgia. I instantly remembered another image like that. Surely this must have been inspired by Duke’s original shot:

You can buy Full Moon here. Actually, you must.

Not one—The New Nation, a newspaper from Bangladesh—but two—the Daily Manab Zamin, who ran the story in Bengali—published the whole story quoting the “Onion News Network, Lebanon, Ohio.” They reprinted the whole thing, starting with the headline: Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked.

Their excuse: “We thought it was true so we printed it without checking.”

Frankly, I understand them. After all, if it is in in the internet, it must be real.

What is even more worrying is that there are a couple of Gizmodo readers—now banned—who actually believed the whole thing when we published it as a joke, and then used it as an argument in the story of Chandrayaan-1’s image on the Apollo 15 landing site. [Wired UK]

Click images to enlarge.

This image was one of the last photographs sent by Chandrayaan-1, the moon probe that stopped communicating with Earth last Saturday. It clearly shows the Apollo 15 rover tracks on the Moon surface.

So there you go: A third party confirms the landings. Happy now, you conspiracy retards? No? I don’t care. Just stop writing me stupid emails justifying your idiotic arguments trying to prove that Armstrong didn’t walk on the moon (he did, and he has the photo and the t-shirt to prove it). [The Times of India]

The dude’s nearly 80 years old by the way. He’s dual-wielding mobile phones, flyin’, rappin‘ and punching out lunatics. I want to be like him when I grow up. [Up Ship Thanks Jonathan!]

Designed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the Apollo Guiding Computer was the most advanced computer of its time. It ran a multitasking operating system called EXEC, capable of executing eight jobs simultaneously. What you are seeing above is just the visible part of it, the Dsky user interface, which was mounted in both the Command Module and the Lunar Module. The astronauts had to enter commands and data for the AGC to process using that keyboard, which also gave them feedback beyond the other million lights and indicators in the cockpits.

Back 40 years ago yesterday, the AGC ran into some unexpected problems: Executive overflows alarms fired up, caused by too many interrupts from the rendezvous radar. This radar was intentionally turned on by the astronauts in case there was a need to abort the mission fast. However, this data—coupled with the landing radar’s stream—overloaded the AGC causing some commands to be delayed.

As we know Armstrong and Aldrin saved the day, helped by ground control and the programmers. The Eagle landed safely and they all lived happily ever after. If it were 1969, they would still be up there now.

You can try to build your own Apollo Guidance Computer following John Pultorak’s full, and exhaustive and huge and dizzying, step-by-step instructions here. [Galaxiki via Universe Today—Image via ibiblio]

Check our complete Apollo 11 coverage here

The suits shown here are part of a collection of Apollo-era artifacts on display right now at the National Air and Space Museum.

The exhibit is part of a 40th anniversary celebration for the event that attention-seeking idiots say never happened so that they can get a few extra clicks and adSense dollars on their crock conspiracy theory web site. Tons more pics over at io9. Can we go back now, please? [io9]