Exactly fifty years ago at this time, American astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were on the surface of the Moon while fellow astronaut Ronald Evans orbited the Moon in the command module. Cernan and Schmitt were the eleventh and twelfth people to walk on the Moon, while Evans was one of another twelve to fly to the Moon without landing on it. Cernan and Schmitt spent over three days on the Moon, and nearly a day of that was spent outside actually walking or driving out on the surface, with both their total time and time outside exceeding the records set in previous missions. But on late on December 14, 1972 (Coordinated Universal Time; in Asia and much of Europe and Africa it was early December 15), Cernan and Schmitt lifted off in the lunar module to rendezvous with Evans a few hours later. Late on December 16, the three left lunar orbit for the return journey to Earth.
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Since that time half a century ago, humans have not been back to the Moon. Of the twelve people who walked on the Moon, only four are still alive: Schmitt, Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 15's Dave Scott, and Apollo 16's Charlie Duke. Of the twelve others who flew to the Moon without landing, six are still alive: Frank Borman (Apollo 8), Jim Lovell (Apollos 8 and 13), Bill Anders (Apollo 8), Tom Stafford (Apollo 10), Fred Haise (Apollo 13) and Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16). The three youngest are Mattingly (86), Duke (87) and Schmitt (87); most of the others are over 90. For that matter, everyone who can actually remember watching or hearing about the Moon landings at the time they were happening is well over fifty now; those of us who recently hit that milestone were too young at the time to have any memory of it, and anyone younger was of course not even born yet. Human exploration of the Moon is not yet gone from living memory, but it is becoming more and more distant in the past.
This is very unfortunate. Not so much because being in the distant past will make it easier for some to claim it never happened; people who claim such things are idiots and fools — after all, only a tiny handful of people alive today are old enough to have even a vague memory of World War I, but only complete idiots would claim that World War I never happened. However, humans landing on the Moon was, at least in terms of physical exploration of our surroundings, our peak achievement as a species, and it is something of a tragedy that in half a century since we have not even managed to replicate it, much less surpass it.
But that may finally be about to change. As those who still manage to keep abreast of a wide range of headlines — or those whose information bubbles include news relating to science and technology — may have heard, the US space agency NASA, responsible for the Apollo missions half a century ago, recently launched the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, this time with major contributions from the European Space Agency. While this mission was uncrewed, the Orion spacecraft that flew to and orbited the Moon over the past few weeks, returning to Earth exactly 50 years to the day and almost to the hour after Cernan and Schmitt landed on the Moon (December 11 UTC), is designed to eventually carry humans, and if all goes well, the next Artemis mission will take humans back to the Moon again. We will have to wait until at least 2024 for this to happen, and that first mission back, like Apollo missions 8 and 10 (and 13, though for less fortunate reasons), won't involve landing on the Moon, just flying there and coming back. But that's far more than we've done in half a century, and the mission after that, perhaps in 2025 or 2026, should see humans landing on the Moon once more, and this time those going will include women and people of color, unlike the Apollo missions, which were exclusively crewed by white men.
I fervently hope that most of the remaining Apollo astronauts will still be around to see humans return to the Moon. But just as importantly, I hope that once we as a species do get back to the Moon, we will continue to explore it regularly, and even go beyond it, to Mars or the asteroids. Of course if we want to maintain a regular presence in space beyond low Earth orbit (there have already been in low Earth orbit continuously for the entire 21st century) for decades or even centuries, we will have to solve the many problems we have created for ourselves down on Earth, including the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and many more. But despite what some people might say, and indeed have been saying since the Apollo era, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be going to the Moon. Going to the Moon and solving problems on Earth are not mutually exclusive goals; in fact, our exploration of space, including figuring out how to sustain human life far from Earth, can be directly useful in finding ways to deal with Earth-bound problems (and it can also just provide inspiration — the famous Blue Marble photo of Earth, which helped inspire the environmental movement, was taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts).
So let's celebrate the anniversary of Apollo 17 with the hope that in the next two or three years, humans will finally follow in the footsteps of Cernan, Schmitt, and their fellow Apollo astronauts, and we will get to see people walking on the Moon, not as distant history but as part of our present.
