Remembering Apollo 17, fifty years after the last manned mission to the Moon
Click for full image.
Link here.
The article comes from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and includes a number of LRO photos of the landing site, including the oblique annotated image to the right, reduced to post here. As the article notes:
The Apollo 17 crew was the last of an era in human space exploration and the last to set foot on the Moon. Fifty years later, the landing sites, hardware, and footsteps remain delicately preserved on the lunar surface. Join the LRO team as we commemorate their inspiring achievements with additional images, research, maps, interactive sites, and a dedicated video. LRO continues to image the Apollo sites whenever possible, under multiple lighting conditions, and combine these images into interactive sites, like the Apollo 17 Temporal Traverse. The Lunar QuickMap 3D tool can be used to preview the Apollo landing sites and search for LROC images of the areas. For downloadable maps of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, visit the Map Sheets section on our downloads page here. Finally, the Apollo 17 fiftieth anniversary video below presents highlights of the mission with landing site views reconstructed using LROC images and topography.
I have embedded that video below. It does a marvelous job summarizing this mission, which in many ways remains the most daring human exploration mission since Columbus dared cross an ocean in a tiny ship only slightly larger than many lifeboats.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
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Click for full image.
Link here.
The article comes from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and includes a number of LRO photos of the landing site, including the oblique annotated image to the right, reduced to post here. As the article notes:
The Apollo 17 crew was the last of an era in human space exploration and the last to set foot on the Moon. Fifty years later, the landing sites, hardware, and footsteps remain delicately preserved on the lunar surface. Join the LRO team as we commemorate their inspiring achievements with additional images, research, maps, interactive sites, and a dedicated video. LRO continues to image the Apollo sites whenever possible, under multiple lighting conditions, and combine these images into interactive sites, like the Apollo 17 Temporal Traverse. The Lunar QuickMap 3D tool can be used to preview the Apollo landing sites and search for LROC images of the areas. For downloadable maps of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, visit the Map Sheets section on our downloads page here. Finally, the Apollo 17 fiftieth anniversary video below presents highlights of the mission with landing site views reconstructed using LROC images and topography.
I have embedded that video below. It does a marvelous job summarizing this mission, which in many ways remains the most daring human exploration mission since Columbus dared cross an ocean in a tiny ship only slightly larger than many lifeboats.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
It does a marvelous job summarizing this mission, which in many ways remains the most daring human exploration mission since Columbus dared cross an ocean in a tiny ship only slightly larger than many lifeboats.
It is easy to objectively appreciate Apollo, in toto, as a Cold War PR stunt in purpose; and its programmatic nature as unwittingly leaving a deeply counterproductive legacy of what Rand Simberg calls a “cargo cult,” which has distorted and retarded human progress into space for five decades and counting.
And yet, for all that, this video is another helpful reminder of a larger truth: That Apollo was, in so many ways, the greatest single technological and exploration achievement in human history, and that its final mission was (thanks to building on the achivement previous missions, and the presence of the first professional scientist on the crew), the most ambitious and scientifically successful of its nine forays to the Moon. None of it should have been possible; the technology of the day was leveraged to its absolute limits by a cadre of brilliant and tireless engineers, scientists, astronauts, and technicians who sacrificed the best years of their lives and even, in some cases, their marriages, to make this stupendous achievement possible, generations ahead of any realistic expectation. A thousand years from now, when we are all long since reduced to dust, and the passions of our age reduced to historical curiosity, it will deserve to be remembered and honored as such. And I think it will be.
Richard M: I don’t know why your comment went to moderation, but I have now approved it. No need however to double post. I had deleted the duplicate.
Thanks, Bob!
Noteworthy that the only Apollo moon mission that did,nt make in was Apollo 13 Think about it if possible
Thank you for finding the LRO video. I’ve embedded into my own post on the mission, Apollo 17: “Le Voyage Dans La Lune”.
Perhaps it’s because it’s the memories of a little boy who was too young to remember the other Apollo flights, but Apollo 17 has always been my favourite, mainly because by 1972 my home country of New Zealand finally had satellite TV and we could see the moonwalks live, plus its TV coverage being the best of all the missions. They are days that seemed magical.