"I've been waiting for this day for 31 years, " said Eugene A Cernan, the last astronaut to set foot on the Moon.

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Those were the first words that any human being ever spoke on another world, when Neil Armstrong was the first to set foot on the Moon in 1969.

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Being the second country to have one of its citizens set foot on the Moon (after the U.S.) would be extremely valuable in terms of publicity and prestige alone.

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NASA, the American space agency, was set up within a year and President John Kennedy took up the challenge that Americans should be the first to set foot on the moon.

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Once that flag was planted, America became the first country to set foot on the moon, and we all felt a part of that moment, watching it over and over on YouTube decades later.

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Tom Wolfe argued in a New York Times op-ed a couple of days ago that the space program died at the moment Armstrong set foot on the moon that the poetic trajectory of space exploration flattened at that moment, and NASA was never able to recover.

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