The journey's end

Apollo 11 landing on the moon and successfully returning three astronauts to Earth 50 years ago was, and will always be, a remarkable achievement.

A highly politicized event from the get-go, the gravity of the achievement has not diminished over time, especially when you consider that no American has ventured beyond near-Earth orbit in the five decades since.

I was 9 years old when Neil Armstrong first set foot upon the moon. It stands out in my memory because bedtime was strictly 9 p.m., but my dad didn't blink an eye about allowing us to camp out on the couch and stay up until past 11 (my gosh! life exists after 9) and watch those flickering, ghostly images of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bouncing around in the low lunar gravity on an equally ghostly, flickering black-and-white TV set.

In all, NASA sent nine crewed missions to the moon, including Apollo 13, which was forced to return without landing due to a near-disastrous explosion, as was chronicled in the excellent Ron Howard film of the same name.

Six of those missions landed astronauts on the moon; the final was Apollo 17, in December 1972. I would have been 13 at the time, and I can tell you I remember next to nothing about that mission, and I've been an avid NASA fan for most of my life.

Apollo 17 was what NASA referred to as a J-type mission, according to NASA's website. The J-type missions were distinguished from previous G- and H-series missions by "extended hardware capability, larger scientific payload capacity and by the use of the battery-powered Lunar Roving Vehicle, or LRV," the website says.

I loved watching the LRV, which also gave us the first view of the upper stage of the lunar module, or LM, blasting off from the moon's surface.

The missions were also longer; the astronauts spent 75 hours on the lunar surface, specifically in the Taurus-Littrow region, which NASA notes was picked as a location with rocks both older and younger than those previously returned from other Apollo missions.

Sadly, Apollo 17 ended crewed exploration of other worlds, a task that has been handled remarkably well by robotic craft, especially on Mars missions.

The lack of crewed exploration, I think, has diminished the space program's impact in the 50 years following the lunar landings. Instead of setting foot on other worlds, we've been content to loop around the globe on an International Space Station, letting another nation carry the load for getting spacecraft to and from near-Earth orbit. I blame a lot of that on the massive amount of funding that went into the space shuttle program, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but became way too costly -- both in equipment and the toll it exacted in human lives.

I wrote years ago that, quite unintentionally, I've had the privilege of seeing the final remaining complete Saturn V launch vehicles on public display. One was at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, that I drove down to see in the early 1980s on a whim while visiting friends in Dallas. Another Dana and I got to see on our honeymoon, at the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando. The final one I got to see with Noah when he went to Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

They are truly impressive sights to see, even though weathered by time, with birds nesting everywhere. I always tried to imagine them upright, billowing vapor from cryogenic liquids, with a crew perched at the top waiting for the massive engines to belch out massive plumes of fire.

It's hard to remember when those giants once thundered from the Earth, carrying brave astronauts who knew that one wrong step or one bad piece of equipment would end their journey forever. It's a real shame that all it really took was a lack of money and human incentive to keep the journey going, 50 years later.

Editorial on 07/20/2019

Upcoming Events