It’s been 50 years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Astronaut Neal Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind.” All of Middle Georgia’s invited to honor this milestone from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, July 20, as Georgia College pays special tribute to the 50th anniversary and future of space exploration.
 
Visitors can view cosmic memorabilia, make and set off rockets, create craters, watch Planetarium shows and eat moon pies. It’s all part of a celebration envisioned by Astronomy Lecturer Dr. Laura Whitlock, one of few women astrophysicists in the world and a former NASA employee.

Newspapers saved by Astrophysicist Dr. Laura Whitlock. She was 10 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
 
“The world stopped for a minute and realized this was big,” Whitlock said. “You could tell by the coverage on TV, the tickertape parade in New York City and all the accolades the three astronauts were given.”
 
“And, afterwards, you looked at the moon a little differently,” she said. “We walked there. It did change your perspective on things, even if you were only 10 at the time. You began to understand—it’s not out of our reach. Man was there.”
 
Sponsored by Georgia College’s Science Education Center, the celebration’s two main themes are fundamentals of rocketry and craters. Both tie into the main concept: understanding motion.
 
The day begins at Heritage Hall in Ina Dillard Russell Library on Clarke Street in Milledgeville with a display of 25 large posters. They show a timeline of space exploration from the 1961 speech by former U.S. President John F. Kennedy—announcing his ambitious goal to reach the moon—to the development of rockets, the astronaut program and Apollo 11 mission. There’ll be moon rocks, old newspapers, commemorative toys, model rockets and more.
 
From there, participants can enjoy hands-on activities and moon pies at Beeson Hall. Paper rockets can be decorated with stickers and launched by blowing on straws. Pop rockets, made with film cannisters, shoot 30-40 feet in the air powered by Alka-Seltzer tablets. Paper nose cones and fins can be added to control motion.
 
Moon craters can be created by dropping marbles onto cocoa powder and flour. Kids of all ages can be photographed at an astronaut cut-out board. There will also be styrofoam stomp rockets, solar telescopes, information booths and more.
 
“You drop the marbles from various heights, so they strike at different velocities and dig deeper and spew farther,” Whitlock said. “If you throw the marble at an angle, you get what looks like a stone skipping on water.”
 
“This makes a mess,” she added, “and kids love that. It leads to great discussions about forces. Motion is all about force.”
 
Every hour on its 20-foot-diameter dome, the Georgia College Planetarium at Herty Hall will feature space films about the Apollo space mission, its people and asteroid impacts.
 
Science professors and college students will be on-hand to answer questions about the cosmos and discuss NASA’s next-generation spacecraft, designed to go back to the moon and beyond. Whitlock hopes the anniversary celebration excites people—the way she was excited as a 3-year-old seeing rockets for the first time in a museum. Her enthrallment was captured in an old family movie.
 
“You can see me just running at breakneck speed from one rocket to another, flapping my hands,” Whitlock said. “At the end of that visit, I informed my parents I was going to grow up and study space, and I never changed my mind.”
 
“You never know what’s going to excite you,” she said. “Sometimes, you just need something that captures the imagination and turns the country on, and we haven’t had that in a long time.”
 
A traveling exhibit with poster panels and science experiments will commence this summer and run through fall. Aided by students and Science Education Center Director Dr. Catrena Lisse, Whitlock will visit school classrooms, community centers and libraries to ignite young minds.
 
“We’re excited to be sponsoring this celebration,” Lisse said, “because we’re hoping another 3-year-old Laura will get excited and grow up to work for NASA. We want them to see it’s possible.