Apollo 14 splashed down in the Pacific today. Shepard, Roosa, and Mitchell are home safely. The mission lasted nine days.
Eight men have walked on the Moon. Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Shepard, Mitchell. Wait — that’s six. The moonwalkers from Apollo 14 are Shepard and Mitchell. With Apollo 12’s Conrad and Bean, and the Apollo 11 crew, that’s six. Let me recount:
Apollo 11: Armstrong, Aldrin. Two men.
Apollo 12: Conrad, Bean. Four total.
Apollo 14: Shepard, Mitchell. Six total.
Six men. Not eight — I miscounted earlier, wrote this too fast. Six men have walked on the Moon. I’m writing it down so I stop getting it wrong.
The Fra Mauro science will take months to analyze. The rocks they brought back — breccias, the fractured and re-welded rock formed by ancient impacts — will tell geologists about the conditions during the formation of the Mare Imbrium basin 3.8 billion years ago. Fra Mauro was the target because it sits on the ejecta blanket from that ancient impact. Every rock there is a record of something that happened early in the Moon’s history.
Stuart Roosa, in the Command Module Kitty Hawk, carried hundreds of tree seeds from the US Forest Service — a kind of experiment, to see what happens to seeds that travel to the Moon. “Moon trees,” they’ll call them if the seeds germinate and grow after the mission. I find this charming. Apollo 14 went to the Moon and came back with tree seeds. Life trying to go everywhere it can.
I also want to say something about what this mission means coming after Apollo 13. Nine months ago, a spacecraft exploded 200,000 miles from Earth and we spent six days not knowing if three men would come home. They did. And then the program stopped for a while — longer than people expected — while they investigated what went wrong and what needed to be fixed. And now here we are: another mission, another landing, six men total on the Moon. The program survived. It kept going.
I don’t want to be complacent about this. I don’t want to say “we’ve overcome everything.” We haven’t. There will be more problems. There always are. But today, watching the parachutes deploy and the capsule hit the water and the recovery swimmers doing their work, I felt something I needed to feel: the program is intact. We’re still going. The decade’s work is not finished.
Apollo 15 is coming. Longer missions now, with the Lunar Rover. A car on the Moon. There’s still so much left to see.