Neil Armstrong defends Constellation

The White House’s new space policy which anticipates the stopping of the Constellation programme and therefore any return to the Moon is still meeting both praise and strong contestation. On the occasion of hearings organised by the United States’ Chamber of Representatives in Washington DC, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan (who respectively commanded Apollo 11, 13 and 17) made known their opposition to the plans set out by Barack Obama during his speech on 15 April 2010. Gene Cernan has also qualified the budget put forward by the White House as a “blueprint for a mission to nowhere”, whereas Neil Armstrong expressed in carefully chosen words his disagreement with the method used for thinking out and then announcing this plan and confided that it had been “painful to watch”.

Full text of the testimony made by Neil Armstrong (PDF)

This recorded testimony is available on YouTube (below)



Published on 31 May 2010