Abstract
When Harrison Schmidt and Gene Cernan returned to Earth at the end of the Apollo 17 mission they had hopes of returning to the Moon within a few years. Cernan climbed up the ladder into the Lunar Module just before midnight (Houston time) on December 13, 1972, but he didn’t realize how much history he was making. He would be the last human to walk on the Moon’s surface for at least 50 years.
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Notes
- 1.
There are at least three different weights that are pronounced “ton.” For brevity, I use the word “ton” to signify a weight of 1,000 kilograms (about 2,205 lbs) instead of “tonne” or “metric ton.” Note that in the United States and Canada, “ton” usually means 2,000 pounds, while in the rest of the world it usually means 2,240 lbs.
- 2.
Examples of the videos can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOZE6lvpzYo.
- 3.
At its peak (1965-66) 4% of the federal budget was required to finance the Apollo program - see Chapter 5. There seems little political appetite for a commitment on that scale for a mission to return to the Moon.
- 4.
Emphasis added.
- 5.
Chairman of the Senate Aeronautical & Space Sciences Committee as well as Senate Majority Leader.
- 6.
At that time, Chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission.
- 7.
First animal in space (Nov. 1957), first animal recovered from space (Aug. 1960), first probe to hit the Moon (Sept. 1959), etc.
- 8.
See [6], pp. 124–125 for a discussion of this point.
- 9.
See Exhibits 20a and 20b of [7].
- 10.
Orbital ATK (previously called Orbital Sciences) and SpaceX.
- 11.
Boeing and SpaceX.
- 12.
His position on the Forbes “Rich List” fluctuates, as the value of Tesla and his other companies change on the stock market: on May 10, 2019, he was number 40 on the list.
- 13.
See for example [16].
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Norris, P. (2019). Why Is It Taking So Long to Return to the Moon?. In: Returning People to the Moon After Apollo. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14915-4_9
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