It is now over 50 years – more than a generation – since humans last walked on the Moon.
The Apollo 17 mission, from 7 to 19 December 1972, was the only Apollo mission to launch at night, and the only mission to explicitly feature a scientist as an astronaut – and our sciences continue to benefit from that mission.
Those were the days when only straight, white men were considered as having ‘the right stuff’ to be US astronauts. When Moonwalkers Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt left the lunar surface on 14 December 1972, their departure marked the end of the Apollo Moon mission era, and no humans have returned to the Moon since then.
But our world has changed.
Astronauts these days include a range of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, genders, nationalities, and sexualities, many of whom have flown on space shuttles or the International Space station, all of them in lower Earth orbit. When the Artemis program returns humans to the Moon starting around 2025, NASA proudly boasts that this will include the first women and the first people of colour to walk on the Moon.
But the biggest change can be found here on Earth. Our smart phones, Wi-Fi, GPS, computers, entertainment streaming services, agriculture and food processing, medicine and medical equipment, everyday and sporting footwear and clothing – everything from the Internet to smart watches, from weather forecasting to traffic control – all these modern technologies came out of the scientific boom that was needed to send men to the Moon. We live in a space age world that was created by Apollo. We are the first genuine space age generation.
Sadly, that same cynical generation of young adults – too young to have lived through the space race – are happy to interact with the space age technology in their daily lives while expressing doubts that it ever happened. Their disbelief borders on the edge of that twilight zone where critical thinking battles scepticism and loses – such as believing that aliens built the pyramids because of a (somewhat racist) doubt that a pre-modern (non-white) human civilisation was capable of astonishing feats of engineering.
We must remember that people are capable of great feats of science and technology, and we do not need conspiracies to inflate our achievements. Our world, and our daily lives, are testimony to the explosion of technology that the space age birthed. Moon hoax conspiracies are as fantastical as are flat earth theories or the proposal that Australia is a fake place full of paid crisis actors.
The space program has touched our lives in practical ways that are ubiquitous. It must now also touch our understanding and our hearts. We are children of the space age, and we need to recognise our place in this new world.
“Space is for everybody. It’s not just for a few people in science or math, or for a select group of astronauts. That’s our new frontier out there, and it’s everybody’s business to know about space.” – Christa McAuliffe.
©2023 Geoff Allshorn