In a ceremony at the White House today, Barack Obama honored slain gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk and lesbian tennis great Billie Jean King with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Obama on Harvey Milk:

“His name was Harvey Milk. And he was here to recruit us. All of us.  To join a movement and change a nation. For much of his early life he had silenced himself. In the prime of his life, he was silenced by the act of another. But in the brief time in which he spoke, and ran and led, his voice stirred the aspirations of millions of people. He would become after several attempts, one of the first openly gay Americans elected to public office, and his message of hope, hope unashamed, unafraid, could not ever be silenced. It was Harvey who said it best. “You gotta give them hope.”

Complete list of recipients below the clip. Obama speaks of Milk around the 8:08 mark.

Medal of Freedom Recipients

Nancy Goodman Brinker
Founder of Susan G Komen for the Cure, a prominent US organisation that raises money for breast cancer research

Dr Pedro Jose Greer Jr
Physician and founder of organisations that provide medical care to Miami’s poor and homeless

Stephen Hawking
Cambridge University physicist and author of popular science books. Hawking is severely disabled from motor neuron disease.

Jack Kemp
Republican politician and retired professional football player who passed away in May. A longtime member of the House of Representatives, Kemp was the party’s 1996 vice-presidential candidate.

Senator Edward Kennedy
Younger brother of President John F Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, Kennedy is known as a “liberal lion” in the US Senate for his championing of healthcare reform and civil rights.

Billie Jean King
Retired professional tennis player and one of the first openly lesbian sports figures. King defeated former number one player Bobby Riggs in the celebrated 1973 “battle of the sexes” match.

Reverend Joseph Lowery
Civil rights leader and co-founder with Martin Luther King Jr of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lowery gave the benediction at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Joe Medicine Crow
The last living war chief of the American Indians of the US Great Plains, according to the White House, and the author of seminal works of American Indian culture and history. While a soldier in the second world war, Medicine Crow stole 50 Nazi SS horses from a German camp.

Harvey Milk
The first openly gay elected official of a major city, Milk, a San Francisco supervisor, was assassinated in 1978. He is revered as a founder of the gay rights movement.

Sandra Day O’Connor
The first woman on the US supreme court, appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

Sidney Poitier
The first African-American to win an Oscar for best actor, Poitier starred in the first mainstream movies to portray romantic interracial relationships.

Chita Rivera
A prominent Hispanic singer and actress, Rivera played Anita in the film of West Side Story. She has won two Tony awards and been nominated seven more times.

Mary Robinson
First female president of Ireland, and a former UN high commissioner for human rights.

Janet Davison Rowley
A Chicago geneticist and cancer researcher, Rowley identified the genetic basis of leukaemia, lymphoma and other cancers.

Desmond Tutu
A South African anti-apartheid leader and Anglican archbishop emeritus. Won the Nobel peace prize in 1984 for his efforts at racial reconciliation.

Muhammad Yunus
Pioneer of microloans – small, low-interest loans to the poor extended without collateral. Yunus won the Nobel peace prize for his Grameen Bank’s efforts in his native Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Once known as the “most trusted man in America,” former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite passed away this evening after a long illness at the age of 92.

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title “anchorman” was first applied, and he came so identified in that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages. (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters.)

“He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator,” CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

In a career spanning more than half a century, Cronkite will perhaps be most remembered for his honest and human coverage of some of the most important news events in modern American history, including the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Apollo moon landing, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

Since this week is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, it seems appropriate to re-visit his coverage of that event.

And that’s the way it is. Rest in peace Mr. Cronkite.

Warning… veering off topic…

On a humid July morning 40 years ago today, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin climbed aboard the most dangerous vehicle man had ever built, on a voyage to the moon.

I was two and half years old. I remember that day, or at least have convinced myself that I remember it, sitting in front of an old black and white television watching a streak of light hurtle towards the stars.

Like most boys growing up, I was fascinated by all things space and dinosaurs. While interest in the Jurassic and Cretaceous eventually faded, the love of space and space travel, did not. Astronomy books, science-fiction novels, movies, I couldn’t get enough. I was a certified space geek.

When I went off to college I decided to study aerospace engineering, with the dream of working one day for NASA or JPL, but soon realized I had little of the prerequisite discipline necessary for that field of study, ie the math. And there was a lot of it. So I switched to Journalism, which had only slightly more math than English. But my interest in all things space never waned.

Barely a year into my studies I watched in horror as the shuttle Challenger exploded into a million pieces across the Atlantic. I attended no class that day, not even the Astronomy elective I was taking. I remember President Reagan’s moving tribute later that same evening: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God…”

There have certainly been other triumphs and disasters since, but for me, none quite so much like the day humankind took their first steps on the moon.

In honor of 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, the JFK Library and Museum explores the mission in extraordinary detail at WeChooseTheMoon.com. The site tracks the mission in realtime as it happened, creating a thoroughly immersive and cool experience. Be sure to check it out.

There are also some beautiful, and some rarely seen photographs from before, during and after the mission at The Big Picture: Remembering Apollo 11.

Looking back over these past 4 decades as a man in his early 40s, I had hoped by now we would have at least planted a flag, any flag, in the red sands of Mars. But unfortunately, no. In fact it’s been 37 years since we last walked the on the face of the moon. And now, as I approach middle age, it seems unlikely that either will happen, or happen again, in my lifetime.

But I am a space geek. And I am hopeful.

Video of that memorable launch and landing below.