In california on a hot afternoon in pasadena for our monthly Public Lecture series. Im preston dikes. 50 years ago three human beings set out on a journey across a quarter million miles of space to the moon. Two of them set down in a fragile Landing Craft on the lunar surface, and one of them stepped into history uttering a phrase we all know by heart. For that one human being to make that one small step took the focussed efforts of hundreds of thousands of people over the course of a decade. An industry and universities and in government. For their part, jpl and cal tech didnt play the leading roles in the apollo effort, but for all who contributed to apollo, as for all of us who play even a small role in the Space Program today, the true reward lay not in the glory of the moment but in contributing to something greater. Something that mattered. Jpl ease primary role then and now is to help lead the Robotic Exploration of the solar system including technologies that contributed to apo