Second Man On The Moon Celebrates The Landing's 45th Anniversary

Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin is turning to social media to get people involved in the 45th anniversary of man's first landing on the Moon.

It was July 20, 1969, when Aldrin and Neil Armstrong touched down on the lunar surface. And Aldrin hopes he can generate a conversation about the historic event using the hashtag #Apollo45 and establishing a #Apollo 45 YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is the home of an anniversary video that features such celebrities as John Travolta and Tim Allen, scientist Stephen Hawking, movie director J.J. Abrams, Sir Richard Branson, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. All talk about what the first landing on the Moon meant to them.

USA Today reports that Aldrin has two iPhones and an iPad he is using in the campaign. But he refutes the assertion that there is more computing power in an iPhone than the computers that guided his spacecraft to the Moon. "Can it communicate with someone that can give it its exact XYZ state vector? Can it land safely on another object? No, it's gonna hit the floor and crash and probably stop working. We didn't have color ... but we certainly got the most out of our computers," he said during a recent Skype meetup.

Aldrin is encouraging the public to upload their recollections of the day to various social media sites using the #Apollo45 tag.

Aldrin hopes that he can build momentum during this 45th anniversary and keep it going to the 50th coming in 2019. But "we need to start now," he said.

(Image captured from YouTube video)

FMI: Video