WASHINGTON — The same question that could have been asked 40 years ago moments after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon is still being asked today: Now what?

On the 40th anniversary of man's first moon landing, the Apollo 11 crew met with President Obama, who used the opportunity to talk about inspiration and science and math education. He didn't talk about going anywhere in space.

Obama said he wanted to use yesterday's anniversary of the Apollo moon landing to show that "math and science are cool again."

"The touchstone for excellence in exploration and discovery is always going to be represented by the men of Apollo 11," Obama said. He said their work sparked "innovation, the drive, the entrepreneurship, the creativity back here on Earth."

That's not what the men who went to the moon had in mind.

Earlier in the day, seven Apollo astronauts, including Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin, used a news conference to talk about their desire to go to Mars and not linger on the moon as long as NASA plans.

On a day when everyone lauded NASA for landing on the moon and dreaming big, the space agency's overall plan for future exploration remained in a holding pattern.

The Obama administration is waiting for a recommendation from an outside panel, which will examine a return-to-the-moon policy that started under President George W. Bush and compare that to other goals and different spaceship designs.

Five years ago, Bush said he wanted astronauts back on the moon by 2020. Yesterday, with Armstrong standing next to him and nodding, Obama said those words: "Keep the goal by 2020."

But he wasn't finished. "Keep the goal by 2020 of having the highest college graduation rates of any country on Earth, especially in the math and science fields."

The Obama administration isn't quite ready to make long-term commitments to space exploration, said John Logsdon, former George Washington University space policy director.

Human exploration is NASA's shining past, but some of the agency's best recent work has been done without humans, such as robots on Mars, space telescopes and Earth-observing satellites, said Smithsonian space curator Roger Launius. He said "it's become painfully obvious" that NASA's robots "are kind of the new sexy thing."

Obama also said Apollo 11's three-man crew "was somehow able to lift our sights, not just here in the United States but around the world." He said he recalled watching Apollo astronauts return to Hawai'i after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. He said he'd sit on his grandfather's shoulders and "we'd pretend like they could see us as we were waving at folks coming home."