It's 2019. Why haven't humans gone back to the moon since the Apollo missions?
NASA is now planning it's next mission, Artemis, a program which aims to land two astronauts near the moon’s south pole and is expected to cost over $1.6B.
In retrospect, Apollo 11 was even more exceptional than we thought.
NASA put two astronauts on the moon on July 20, 1969, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy announced the audacious goal and a mere 12 years after the dawn of the Space Age.
Five more crewed missions hit the gray dirt after Apollo 11, the last of them, Apollo 17, touching down in December 1972.
On Dec. 13, 1972, scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt is photographed standing next to a huge boulder during the final Apollo moon-landing mission, Apollo 17. (Image: © Eugene Cernan/NASA)
Humanity hasn't been back to Earth's nearest neighbor since (though many of our robotic probes have). NASA has mounted multiple crewed moon projects since Apollo, including the ambitious Constellation Program in the mid-2000s, but none of them have gone the distance.
So what was different about Apollo? It was incubated in a very particular environment, experts say — the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union.
"This was war by another means — it really was," Roger Launius, who served as NASA's chief historian from 1990 to 2002 and wrote the recently published book "Apollo's Legacy" (Smithsonian Books, 2019), told Space.com. "And we have not had that since."
The Soviet Union fired the first few salvos in this proxy war. The nation launched the first-ever satellite, Sputnik 1, in October 1957 and put the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961. These shows of technological might worried U.S. officials, who wanted a big win of their own. And they believed putting the first boots on the moon would do the trick.
This wasn't viewed as empty flexing. The United States wanted, among other things, to show the world that the future lay with its political and economic systems, not those of its communist rival.
"The Apollo days were not, fundamentally, about going to the moon," John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C., told Space.com. "They were about demonstrating American global leadership in a zero-sum Cold War competition with the Soviet Union."
Report a Typo
