MARINA DEL REY, CA -- The 30th anniversary of the July 16 launch of Apollo 11, and man's subsequent first steps on the moon should be celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in the history of man, said the director of development for the Ayn Rand Institute.
     Let Richard Ralston tell your audience:

• What novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, an eyewitness to the Apollo 11 launch, meant when she wrote -- "What we had seen, in naked essentials -- but in reality, not in a work of art -- was the concretized abstraction of man's greatness."
• Why the Apollo 11 moon shot owes its foundations as much to the Renaissance as to the 20th century.
• Why America, and not the Soviet Union, was the first to put a man on the moon, and why the USSR never succeeded in doing so.
• Why the U.S. moon landing in 1969 was not the stepping stone to greater achievement, as many Americans had hoped.

     After Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon on July 20, 1969, American astronauts returned to the moon five more times. The last lunar mission, Apollo 17, was launched in 1972. Since then, Ralston notes, NASA has stepped back, focusing on sub-orbital manned missions like the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, abandoning the solar system and deep space to unmanned spacecraft.
     "The Apollo 11 flight was undeniable proof that man's achievements are boundless and that the entire universe is open to him," said Ralston. "Since then man has seemed tied and diminished. The best way to honor the pioneers of Apollo would be a renewed, private-enterprise-driven commitment to human achievement and grandeur."