The Last Moon Voyages

The end of the beginning for Human space travel

After Apollo 11 proved that human beings could walk on the Moon, it became time to explore the Moon further. Apollo 12’s Pete Conrad and Alan Bean made the first pinpoint lunar landing to study the Moon’s Ocean of Storms four months after Apollo 11’s astronauts became the first humans to set foot on the Moon.

Conrad and Bean touched down within walking distance of the unpiloted Surveyor 3 probe, proving that astronauts could now visit places of interest to geologists. An explosion aboard the Moon-bound Apollo 13 in Spring 1970 crippled the command module when the craft was about 200,000 miles from Earth.

The crew, Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, were able to use their attached lunar lander as a lifeboat to get back on a course for Earth. They splashed down safely on April 17. Not long afterward, it seemed that there would be no time or money for greater projects in space. There were more urgent priorities closer to home: the Vietnam War, civil rights, the environment.

Neither the Nixon administration nor Congress was willing to devote increasing sums of money toward space exploration. By 1970, NASA had cancelled the three final lunar landings to save money and hardware for other programs. Apollo’s final three missions were scientific expeditions.

On each of these expeditions, a pair of astronauts was outfitted with extra supplies to allow them to spend three days on the Moon. They had improved spacesuits with greater motility, allowing them to take spacewalks of up to seven hours. They also had a battery-powered Lunar Rover that allowed them to travel across the landscape and up mountainsides. In July 1971, Apollo 15’s Dave Scott and Jim Irwin discovered a sample of the Moon’s primordial crust, which was nicknamed the Genesis Rock. It was discovered to be 4.5 billion years old, almost as old as the Moon itself.

In December 1972, Apollo 17’s commander, Gene Ceman, and geologist-astronaut Jack Schmitt explored the Moon’s Taurus-Littrow valley, which is as deep as the Earth’s Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, their crewmate Rob Evans explored the Moon from orbit with the help of high-powered cameras and other sensors. When Ceman, Schmitt and Evans splashed down in the Pacific on December 19, the Apollo program ended.