Louis Vuitton takes its travel theme “to infinity and beyond” in its latest “Core Values” campaign underlining its travel roots:

The campaign features astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Sally Ride, marking the 40th anniversary of “One giant leap for mankind.”

Aldrin, who walked on the moon in 1969 was shot by Annie Leibovitz with his fellow astronauts posed with a battered pickup truck and a Louis Vuitton Icare travel bag while gazing up into the sky in the California desert.

The ads will hit magazines’ July issues in a couple of weeks.

And there will be, of course, a website, www.louisvuittonjourneys.com on which Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Sally Ride discuss how the experience of space changed their lives, offering a fascinating insight into Annie Leibovitz’s print visual.

“The site attains a degree of interactivity that is unprecedented for Louis Vuitton, enabling internet users to view the interviews as if they were actually present by, for example, playing them in any order they want, zooming in on an individual astronaut, or viewing the reactions of one astronaut to what another is saying.

The interviews, which were filmed with three separate movie cameras to create a strange, gravity-defying ambiance, as if the astronauts were indeed in space, can also be downloaded to a computer, MP3 or mobile phone.

Also featured on louisvuittonjourneys.com is a making-of video of the interviews, as well as a focus on The Climate Project, spearheaded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, to which Louis Vuitton is making a donation on behalf of the three astronauts.” (Nitrolicious)

The campaign marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and is intended to be “an homage to these great travelers,” said Antoine Arnault, Vuitton’s head of communications and son of Chairman Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong was also invited to participate in the campaign but declined the offer.

The astronauts are the latest in a quirky series of Vuitton spokespeople, among them Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve and Keith Richards, who have appeared in the brand’s “Core Values” campaigns.

(WWD first reported the trio would pose for Vuitton on March 30)