As he took his final steps before leaving the moon, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan had some poignant closing words: “We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”It was December 14, 1972, and Cernan knew his footprints would be the last to impress the lunar soil for a while, because the planned Apollo missions that were supposed to follow — 18, 19 and 20 — had long since been canceled. But he probably wouldn’t have guessed that, over 50 years later, his speech would stand as the last words spoken by a human on the moon.Artemis II, which NASA is preparing to launch as soon as March after recent testing delays, will perform a lunar fly-by rather than a landing. Still, the mission will mark humanity’s first journey to the vicinity of the moon since Apollo 17.AdvertisementAdvertisementSo why has it taken so long for astronauts to go back?“The short answer to that question is political will,” said Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian of science and technology and the curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. “It takes a whole lot of political will to send humans to the moon. These are extremely complex, really costly, major national investments. It has to be a priority over a sustained period of time.”Earth rises above the moon’s horizon in a photograph taken in July 1969 from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. – NASAIn the years since the Apollo program ended due to budget cuts, there have been a number of other federal initiatives to send humans to the moon again, Muir-Harmony added. “But what’s happened is that as presidential administrations changed, space priorities for these large-scale programs also changed. And so we just haven’t seen the sustained politic …
