HAPPY ANNIVERSARY: As you may recall, today is the 33rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Rand Simberg has developed a way to commemorate the day (and space exploration as a whole), which he describes here.

I had given thought to writing up a lengthy "What If?" column for today, speculating on what direction the space program might have taken had the hardware from Apollo remained in production, but I couldn't get a good handle on it. There were so many upgrades and evolved versions of the Saturn vehicles>, for example, that it's hard to pick a winner.

Even so, it's not difficult to imagine Apollo hardware having been enhanced to support permanent bases on the Moon, as well as launching large space stations. There were numerous proposals for uprating the Saturn V, some by as much as a factor of two, and much could have been done to any Saturn derivative over an extended production run to improve produceability and reduce manufacturing costs. With appropriate docking/berthing hardware, multiple Skylab-derived station modules could have been mated together to provide an enormous space station in short order at minimal cost. Had there been the will to continue with these things, and the foresight to milk what we already had available instead of junking it all and starting over, we could very well be exploring Mars by now.