Apollo astronaut: ‘You go to heaven when you are born’

On February 27, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that two unnamed people are paying his rocket company, SpaceX, to send them on an auto-piloted trip around the moon in 2018. Later The Washington Post revealed that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his own rocket company, Blue Origin, had circulated a 2020 moon colonization plan around Capitol Hill.

9 prominent early astronauts carrying on US space history

Early U.S. space history is fading with the deaths of Gene Cernan , the last man to walk on the moon, John Glenn , the last of the Mercury 7 astronauts, and Neil Armstrong , the first man to walk on the moon. But others survive, veterans of a time when Americans were glued to their television sets to watch their heroics, from fiery Saturn V launches to ocean splashdowns.