End of Orion mission marks the 50th anniversary of the last moon landing

When NASA’s uncrewed Orion capsule returns from its journey around the moon this weekend, it will land on Earth exactly 50 years after Apollo 17, the last of the Apollo missions, touched down on the lunar surface. 

On Dec. 11, 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison (Jack) Schmitt brought their lunar module Challenger to a soft landing in the moon’s rugged valley of Taurus-Littrow. 

It was the longest of all the moon landing missions and the only one to include a scientist. Schmitt was a geologist who had trained astronauts for previous lunar missions how to recognize different rock and mineral types.

When he went up on his first and only space mission, he and Cernan brought back a record 115 kilograms of lunar rocks for study back on Earth. One of those rocks eventually showed how the moon once had a magnetic field like the Earth. 

During their roughly 75-hour stay on the lunar surface, the astronauts performed three spacewalks and deployed several scientific instruments to measure the properties of the moon’s interior and its thin atmosphere.

They also drove an electric rover that took them 7.6 kilometres away from the safety of their lunar module — a lunar surface journey longer than on any other mission. 

As Cernan said in the 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, “I called the moon my home for three days of my life.” The director of another documentary, Last Man on the Moon, also remembered him saying, “I had a house, I had a car, I had a job to do,” about his time on the moon.

While the scientific return from Apollo 17 was high, by the time the flight came along, enthusiasm for the moon missions had waned, both for the public and among politicians who were footing the very expensive bills.

After all, the original goal of going to the moon, set by former U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1962 was not so much for science, but to prove America’s technical superiority over the Soviet Union.

In the early 1960s the Soviet Union had achieved many firsts in space, including putting the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. Once the whole world had seen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make the first footprints on the moon in July 1969, Kennedy’s goal had been achieved. The space race was effectively over.

All of the subsequent missions were about exploring the moon, which is scientifically interesting, but garnered diminishing amounts of the public’s attention. 

The Apollo program was supposed to run 20 missions, but the last three missions were dropped due to lack of funding. Two unused giant Saturn 5 rockets — built for the final missions before they were cancelled — are now in museums at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Now, more than half a century later, through the Artemis program, the plan is to go back to the moon and stay there long-term. The question is, will the political and public interest be sustained long enough to complete this program?

It is going to take a lot of flights and a lot of time to complete all of Artemis’s planned objectives: return people to the moon, build an orbiting space station called Gateway, construct a lunar habitat on the surface, supply rovers and other equipment for exploration and provide support for those who’ll live on the moon for up to two months at a time. The ultimate objective is to prepare for an eventual human mission to Mars.

Excitement is high at the beginning of this ambitious plan but it will be interesting to see in the long run if history repeats itself.