ANALYSIS | End of Orion mission marks the 50th anniversary of the last moon landing | 24CA News

When NASA’s uncrewed Orion capsule returns from its journey across the moon this weekend, it is going to land on Earth precisely 50 years after Apollo 17, the final of the Apollo missions, touched down on the lunar floor. 

On Dec. 11, 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison (Jack) Schmitt introduced their lunar module Challenger to a delicate touchdown within the moon’s rugged valley of Taurus-Littrow. 

It was the longest of all of the moon touchdown missions and the one one to incorporate a scientist. Schmitt was a geologist who had educated astronauts for earlier lunar missions how one can acknowledge completely different rock and mineral sorts.

When he went up on his first and solely area mission, he and Cernan introduced again a document 115 kilograms of lunar rocks for research again on Earth. One of these rocks ultimately confirmed how the moon as soon as had a magnetic subject just like the Earth. 

During their roughly 75-hour keep on the lunar floor, the astronauts carried out three spacewalks and deployed a number of scientific devices to measure the properties of the moon’s inside and its skinny ambiance.

They additionally drove an electrical rover that took them 7.6 kilometres away from the security of their lunar module — a lunar floor journey longer than on another mission. 

As Cernan mentioned within the 2007 documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, “I called the moon my home for three days of my life.” The director of one other documentary, Last Man on the Moon, additionally 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 excessive, by the point the flight got here alongside, enthusiasm for the moon missions had waned, each for the general public and amongst politicians who had been footing the very costly payments.

After all, the unique objective of going to the moon, set by former U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1962 was not a lot for science, however to show America’s technical superiority over the Soviet Union.

In the early Nineteen Sixties the Soviet Union had achieved many firsts in area, together with placing the primary human in area, Yuri Gagarin. Once the entire world had seen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make the primary footprints on the moon in July 1969, Kennedy’s objective had been achieved. The area race was successfully over.

All of the following missions had been about exploring the moon, which is scientifically fascinating, however garnered diminishing quantities of the general public’s consideration. 

The Apollo program was alleged to run 20 missions, however the final three missions had been dropped on account of lack of funding. Two unused big Saturn 5 rockets — constructed for the ultimate missions earlier than they had been cancelled — are actually in museums on the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Now, greater than half a century later, by the Artemis program, the plan is to return to the moon and keep there long-term. The query is, will the political and public curiosity be sustained lengthy sufficient to finish this program?

It goes to take plenty of flights and plenty of time to finish all of Artemis’s deliberate aims: return folks to the moon, construct an orbiting area station referred to as Gateway, assemble a lunar habitat on the floor, provide rovers and different gear for exploration and supply help for many who’ll stay on the moon for as much as two months at a time. The final goal is to arrange for an eventual human mission to Mars.

Excitement is excessive initially of this formidable plan however it will likely be fascinating to see in the long term if historical past repeats itself.