U.S. Embassy Helps to Celebrate Moon Day in Budapest

July 20, 2009

Zoltán Sumitzki, owner of the largest European private collection of space research objects and Tamás Simonyi talk about Moon mission and space travel.

On July 20, the U.S. Embassy partnered with Budapest’s Millenáris Cultural Center to organize a Moon Day, a series of musical, cultural and educational programs to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon.

To commemorate the Apollo 11 Moon Mission, Hungarian astronomer Attila Grandpierre and Tamás Simonyi, the brother of Hungarian-American space tourist, Charles Simonyi, talked about space travel and their experiences with the Moon. The Embassy provided videos from NASA about the story of their 50 years of exploration and about Constellation, a new NASA project that, based on lunar experiences, could take a mission to Mars in the future. The Embassy also shared with the general public audience NASA’s restored and historically important archived clips taken by the Apollo 11 crew on their historic first landing on the Moon. After the presentations and film screening, participants of the program could watch the sky through the lens of an observatory opened up for this occasion in the Millenáris park.

Further information on the NASA web site:

• Apollo 40th Anniversary
• Constellation Program