How that "spirit of Apollo" translates to today's ambitions for space travel, which lean heavily on the use of robots, remains a point of contention among American scientists and leaders.
SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, which also has big ambitions for space tourism, have separately pioneered the concept of returning booster rockets so that they can be reused, which has the potential to make spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 100 (See "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016: Reusable Rockets").
So what's driving Africa's soaring ambitions for space?
The Challenger explosion on January 28 , 1986not only shocked millions watching it on TV, it threw America's ambitions for space into upheaval.
When you look at it, you can actually feel the stirrings of humanity's real ambitions for space, rather than that anticipated sci-fi hard left into brown craters and neon-green robo-helms and things like that.
Such is the case with China's booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will land on the Moon.
Already the Herculeans' ambitions for their space have grown.
The UK has big ambitions for its space sector.
If it can prove that its vehicles work, then NASA will pay it $1.9 billion to run eight cargo flights of its own.Nor are NASA's ambitions for private space firms limited to hauling freight.
But more than calling into question that program's future, the catastrophe also provided a vivid warning to other developing nations tempted to reach for grand ambitions in space on budgets already stretched thin by earthly needs.
A key message is the discrepancy between NASA's current funding ($17 billion per year) and the ambitions outlined in President Bush's vision for space exploration from 2004.
