Forty years have passed since Mr. Neil Armstrong, commander of the United States' Apollo 11 space mission, and astronaut Mr. Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969 (U.S. Eastern Standard Time). They spent 2 1/2 hours outside the landing module Eagle.

Man's first moon landing was broadcast on television worldwide, and people still remember the utterance of Mr. Armstrong when he set foot on the moon: "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind."

The seed for the Apollo program dates back to U.S. President John F. Kennedy's speech to Congress on May 25, 1961, in which declared that the U.S. would land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. The program was politically motivated. The U.S. saw itself in a science/technology race with the Soviet Union, which had become the first country to put a human in space with the Vostok-1 mission on April 12, 1961. The last moon landing mission, Apollo 17, took place in 1972.

In 2004, President George W. Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration plan, aimed at returning a human to the moon by 2020 as a step toward carrying out manned exploration of Mars. The National Research Council (NRC) has recommended that, for the time being, NASA push unmanned exploration of the moon and try to build a facility there for observing Earth and other stellar bodies.

Japan has a plan to send a bipedal robot to the moon around 2020 and carry out manned exploration of the satellite later. But the government is not paying enough attention to what scientific work the robot should do on the moon. Pouring in lots of tax money just to have a robot walk on the moon is absurd. Earlier, Japan pushed the Kibo space lab project without first carefully considering what kinds of experiments were really needed.

In the absence of an evaluation body like the U.S.' NRC, it may be more difficult for Japan to set justifiable scientific goals for its space projects. The government should humbly seek out the advice of scientists in aiming for worthwhile results that will be remembered in the history of science.