The Apollo 11 moon landing, whose 40th anniversary is celebrated this week, is still unsurpassed as a symbol of technological achievement. Visitors to Washington DC's National Air and Space Museum can see the command module up close, and visitors to the Science Museum in London can see the very similar Apollo 10 version. Being this near to the spaceship defies belief: it looks more like a contraption from the steam age than the space age. Did this thing really go around the moon and come home again?

Forty years on, we have our own technological challenges, from finding vaccines for malaria and HIV to producing cheap, effective ways to generate energy without pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we achieve those goals?

More to the point: Neil Armstrong walked on the moon thanks to government management, government money and one of the most famous of all government ambitions. That was President Kennedy's 1961 declaration that, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space.”