Apollo 17 — last humans on the Moon

Apollo 17 began with the only night launch of the Saturn V, at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time on 7 December 1972, a man-made dawn that turned the Florida sky orange and was visible for hundreds of miles. Hours later, on the way to the Moon, the crew photographed the whole sunlit Earth in a single frame: the Blue Marble, which became one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Aboard were commander Gene Cernan, command module pilot Ron Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, the first professional scientist to fly to the Moon.

Cernan and Schmitt landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley, a deep box canyon ringed by mountains, chosen to sample both ancient highlands and young volcanic terrain. Over three days they broke every surface record of the program: 75 hours on the Moon, 22 hours and 4 minutes outside across three moonwalks, 35.7 kilometres driven in the rover, and 110.5 kilograms of samples. At Shorty Crater, Schmitt's trained eye caught a startling streak of orange in the grey: beads of volcanic glass fountained out of the Moon billions of years ago.

Late on 14 December 1972, the expedition ended. Cernan knelt and traced his daughter Tracy's initials in the dust, then stood at the ladder of the lunar module Challenger and spoke deliberately for the history books before climbing inside. The ascent stage rose from Taurus-Littrow, and the valley fell silent. Twelve humans had walked on the Moon in three and a half years; no one then imagined the twelfth would hold that distinction for the rest of the century and beyond.

The gap stretched to 53 years. Not until Artemis II carried four astronauts around the Moon in 2026 did humans again travel to the lunar vicinity, and a crewed landing remains ahead. Apollo 17's haul, especially Schmitt's orange soil and the deep-drill cores, anchored lunar science for that entire half-century, with some sample containers deliberately kept sealed for decades so future laboratories could open them with better instruments than the 1970s could offer.