The last time we went to the Moon

December 14, 1972.

Gene Cernan climbed the ladder of the Lunar Module, stepped off the surface of the Moon, and said: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

That was forty-seven years ago. We haven’t been back.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I want to try to understand it. Not the political reasons or the budget reasons or the Cold War reasons, though all of those are real. I want to understand the emotional shape of it. How do you go to the Moon and then just… stop going?

What Apollo actually was

Here’s something I think gets lost in the nostalgia. Apollo was insane.

Not “insane” as in impressive (though it was that too). Insane as in genuinely reckless by any modern standard. The astronauts knew this. The engineers knew this. Everyone knew this.

The Saturn V rocket had a 14% failure rate across all its components during testing. The Lunar Module had never been tested in lunar conditions before Apollo 11 actually went there. The guidance computer had 74 kilobytes of memory and ran on hand-woven magnetic core rope. The spacesuits were essentially balloons with life support. If a single O-ring, a single valve, a single wiring connection failed at the wrong moment, everyone died.

Apollo 13 proved this. A single oxygen tank exploded and three men almost didn’t come home. The fact that they survived was a miracle of improvisation, not engineering margins.

We went to the Moon six times. Twelve humans walked on the surface. And every single one of them was one small failure away from not coming back.

So part of the reason we stopped is simple: we got lucky, and at some point the luck math got too frightening. After Apollo 17, the calculus was clear. Every additional mission was another roll of the dice.

But that’s not the whole reason

Lots of dangerous things continue despite the risks. We kept flying the Space Shuttle for thirty years after it killed seven people on Challenger. We keep sending people to the International Space Station. Military pilots fly combat missions with far worse odds than Apollo. Humans are not, historically, great at quitting dangerous things.

I think the real reason we stopped going to the Moon is simpler and sadder.

We went to beat the Russians. We beat the Russians. Mission accomplished.

Apollo wasn’t a science program. Not really. It was dressed up as one, and it did real science, and the scientists were genuinely passionate about the research. But the reason Congress funded it, the reason it got something like 4% of the federal budget at its peak, was the Cold War. Kennedy didn’t say “We choose to go to the Moon because of the geological significance of lunar samples.” He said we choose to go because it’s hard. Because it’s a challenge. Because we want to win.

And we won. And then the reason was gone.

The money

I looked up the numbers. At its peak in 1966, NASA’s budget was about 4.4% of the federal budget. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $48 billion per year. Just for NASA.

In 2019, NASA’s budget is about 0.5% of the federal budget. Roughly $21 billion. Less than half of what it was at the peak, adjusted for inflation. And NASA does far more now than it did during Apollo (Earth science, planetary science, the ISS, Hubble, aeronautics research, and more).

The money tells the story more honestly than any political speech. We could afford to go back to the Moon. The United States is a much wealthier country now than it was in 1966. But we choose not to allocate the resources because we don’t feel the urgency.

No one is racing us. No ideological rival is threatening to plant their flag on the lunar surface. And without a race, it turns out, we’re content to look up and not go.

What’s different now

NASA’s Artemis program says it’s going to put people back on the Moon. Maybe by the mid-2020s. I want to believe it.

But I’ve noticed something different about the conversation this time, and I’m not sure what to make of it. In 1961, going to the Moon was framed as national destiny. Failure was unthinkable because the nation’s pride was at stake. The whole country rallied around it, or at least enough of the country did.

In 2019, the conversation about going back to the Moon is… quieter. More practical. There’s talk about lunar bases and resource extraction and using the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars. It’s framed as engineering, not destiny. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has a wonderful exhibit about Apollo that treats it as history. Finished history.

Part of me thinks the practical approach is better. Going to the Moon for science and long-term habitation is more sustainable than going for flags and footprints. If we go back to stay, that matters more than going back for a visit.

But another part of me misses the audacity. The “because it’s hard” of it. The willingness to do something absurdly dangerous and expensive and impractical because the act of doing it meant something beyond the practical result.

I think we lost something when Cernan climbed that ladder. Not the ability to go to the Moon (we still have the physics, the engineering, the knowledge). We lost the collective will to do something just because it’s extraordinary. We replaced it with cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment and return on investment.

Which is more responsible. Probably smarter. But it makes me sad in a way I can’t fully articulate.

Gene Cernan

Cernan died in 2017. He spent the last decades of his life giving talks and interviews, always with the same message: go back. He was haunted by being the last person to walk on the Moon. He didn’t want to be the last forever.

He was eighty-two when he died. He never saw anyone follow his footprints.

I think about him sometimes, late at night, looking up. Knowing he’d been there. Knowing what it felt like. Knowing that the ladder he climbed down from could have been climbed down by a hundred more people, a thousand, if only we’d decided it was worth doing.

God willing, as we shall return.

Forty-seven years and counting.

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