Fifty years ago today, two men awoke on humanity’s last day on the moon.
No one would be back to the moon anytime soon. Plans for additional Apollo missions had been scrapped two years earlier, in 1970. A few minutes before the scheduled wake-up time, two NASA astronauts, Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, called home from the foul-smelling, dusty moon of Apollo 17. Module to sing “Good morning to you” down to Earth. Mission Control responded with an explosion of “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” most recently famous from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the Stanley Kubrick film proposing permanent lunar outposts and human travel to Jupiter
Their formal goodbyes had already been delivered to the TV cameras. All you had to do was finish a few prelaunch checklists, leave to meet Ronald E. Evans in the command module, and then head home to Earth. “Let’s get out now,” Cernan said, and so they did, their craft climbing up from the gray desolation of the moon until it got lost in a black sky.
While many Americans celebrated 50 years in 2019 since Apollo 11 first put Neil and Buzz on the moon, Wednesday’s birthday brings more than a pang of sadness to fans of space exploration. For a few years, the Earth and the Moon were connected by a bridge built through ingenuity, technology, and vast sums of taxpayer money.
A few men – only men, only whites, all except Dr. Schmitt of the US Army – had walked the narrow path across the cold and black and lived to tell the tale. From this point, countless imaginary space futures had blossomed: spinning space stations, boots on Mars, humanity reaching for the edge of the solar system. Then it all went up in a final plume of rocket exhaust.
This year, however, the anniversary of the Apollo 17 mission came in time with a new set of lunar images in dazzling high definition. A new NASA mission called Artemis I – Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister, in Greek myth – had finally flown to the moon last month with a few mannequins on board. Once there, it orbited the Earth without landing and then sailed home without a hitch, crashing safely into the Pacific on the same day, Dec. 11, that Schmitt and Cernan landed on the moon for the last time, half a century earlier.
Artemis 1 did not land any astronauts and its expected successor, Artemis II, will only send a crew of four around the moon and bring them home. But these missions start the path for Artemis III, which should bring a new human crew to the lunar surface later this decade, this time with a woman and a person of color. Symbolically, the message was clear: finally we are really on our way back.
Apollo 17, like Artemis I, was launched from Earth at night. It was a fitting backdrop to the figurative twilight of the Apollo program. “If this were a novel, it would be a scene that would be awesome,” said Lois Rosson, a science historian at the University of Southern California.
That symbolism was not missed, seven miles from what was then known as Cape Kennedy, where a cruise ship loaded with space age stars – the writers Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Norman Mailer, alongside scientists like Carl Sagan, Frank Drake and Marvin Minsky — gathered as a focus group on the future of space exploration.
Many of these attendees believed that the cancellation of Apollo demonstrated the pitfalls of getting the government to encourage space exploration. The Vietnam War, the fight against poverty, and dwindling public support had all put Apollo and the grandiose designs of space enthusiasts in the crosshairs of Congress and the Nixon administration. Perhaps a more private, corporate space effort — similar to SpaceX, which would emerge under Elon Musk in the 2000s — would be a better model.
“That’s where the seeds of that ideology are first planted,” said Dr. Rosson.
On the moon, the astronauts had work to do. Apollo 17 recovered more rocks than any other mission. At one point, the astronauts drove their lunar rover a record-breaking, terrifying-when-you-think-about-7.7 miles away from their lunar module sanctuary. In dr. Schmitt, they also had the only trained geologist to ever walk on the lunar surface. “There’s nothing like putting yourself to sleep thinking of unrealizable dreams,” he later wrote, describing his state of mind after the last moonwalk.
The samples she and the previous Apollo astronauts brought back became foundational to lunar science. For example, these rocks showed that the moon probably formed after an extremely violent collision between baby Earth and another protoplanet. Moon rocks from Apollo 17 also hinted that future astronauts might be able to track down resources such as water and titanium, said David Kring, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
Entire scientific careers have begun and ended in anticipation of a successor like Artemis. “I have several colleagues who are just a little older than me, and they had to retire before they saw this,” said Dr. circle.
Hope is rising now. Not that everyone likes Artemis; we’ve been to the moon before, of course. The current plan to return dates back to the Trump administration and was presented by President Donald J. Trump, along with the idea of always putting America first. President Biden has embraced that timeline and framework as well.
The post-Apollo debate over who should lead space exploration is also raging. Artemis I rode into space on an oft-criticized over-budget mega rocket built on NASA’s traditional model of managing private contractors. Artemis III, meanwhile, is booked for a lunar landing on a new spacecraft under development using a commercial approach at SpaceX. Mr. Musk’s company has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts to supply lunar landers.
Half a century later, disagreements persist about why we go to the moon. Or how. Or that we should even try. Still, it’s hard to see the new images and not feel anything.
After taking off, the Apollo 17 astronauts orbited the moon, then burned fuel to begin the journey back to the blue-green marble that rises above the lunar horizon. It was an unseasonably warm December in 1972. Back then, freshwater dolphins still swam the Yangtze River, golden toads still hopped through the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and more than two northern white rhinoceros lived.
Fast-forward 50 laps around the sun, when Artemis I captured a similar image on its last close approach to the moon before heading home, albeit from a crescent another degree Fahrenheit hotter and with four billion more people. Engineers on the ground stopped yawning. “We just sat there for a minute taking in what we were looking at, and the room was just absolutely silent,” said Mike Sarafin, the Artemis 1 mission manager at NASA.
“Part of what we’re experiencing now, with our brothers and sisters from Apollo, is that they’ve shared wisdom with us that we’re just now really appreciating,” said Mr. Sarafin.