Apollo 16 splashed down in the Pacific today. John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charles Duke are home safely. The mission lasted eleven days.
Ten men have walked on the Moon. I keep the list:
Neil Armstrong — Apollo 11 — July 1969
Buzz Aldrin — Apollo 11 — July 1969
Pete Conrad — Apollo 12 — November 1969
Alan Bean — Apollo 12 — November 1969
Alan Shepard — Apollo 14 — February 1971
Edgar Mitchell — Apollo 14 — February 1971
Dave Scott — Apollo 15 — July/August 1971
Jim Irwin — Apollo 15 — July/August 1971
John Young — Apollo 16 — April 1972
Charles Duke — Apollo 16 — April 1972
Ten people. Ten human beings who have stood on another world. Ten sets of footprints in the lunar regolith.
I keep the list because I don’t want to lose track of them. These are real people. Young is forty-two. Duke is thirty-six. Duke is now the youngest person to walk on the Moon. Armstrong remains the first. Cernan — if Apollo 17 goes well — will be the last.
Apollo 17 is scheduled for December 1972. Gene Cernan, the man who flew over the surface in Apollo 10 and didn’t land, will command it. Harrison Schmitt will be the Lunar Module Pilot — a professional geologist, not just a pilot who’s been trained in geology. The first scientist to walk on the Moon. Ron Evans will orbit in the Command Module.
It will be the last one. The program is ending. Not because we’ve learned everything — we’ve barely started. But the budget, the political will, the cost in time and money and risk — these things have their limits. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled years ago. 17 is the last mission. I’ve known this for a while. I don’t want to think about it too hard yet.
For today: ten men on the Moon. Two successful years of scientific exploration with the Rover. The Genesis Rock, the orange soil anomaly we haven’t found yet (that’s Apollo 17), the genesis of everything we know about the early solar system written in the rocks of the lunar highlands. This program did things that seemed impossible in 1961.
It did them. Ten men. The Moon. I keep the list.