On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon.

Forty-five years later, NASA will celebrate on Monday the giant leap by honouring Armstrong, who died in 2012, with a renaming ceremony of the historic “operations and checkout building” at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the launch site.

Kennedy's Operations and Checkout Building has played a vital role in NASA’s spaceflight history. It was used during the Apollo program to process and test the command, service and lunar modules. Today, the facility is being used to process and assemble NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which the agency will use to send astronauts to an asteroid in the 2020s and Mars in the 2030s.

The renaming ceremony will include  Apollo 11’s Aldrin, Michael Collins and and astronaut Jim Lovell, who was the mission’s back-up commander. International Space Station NASA astronauts Steve Swanson, who is the current station commander, and Reid Wiseman, also will take part in the ceremony from their orbiting laboratory 260 miles above Earth.

The Apollo missions blazed a path for human exploration to the moon and today, we are extending that path to near-Earth asteroids, Mars and beyond, the statement of NASA added.(KH)