After Apollo: What the Space Race Left Behind

The Moon race ended on December 14, 1972. Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, was the last person to stand on the lunar surface. He said: "We leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return." Then he climbed the ladder.

Nobody has been back.

**The six landings**

Apollo 12 through 17 completed five more successful landings (Apollo 13, in April 1970, aborted after an oxygen tank exploded en route to the Moon; the three-man crew survived by using the Lunar Module as a lifeboat). Astronauts drove a lunar rover on the last three missions. They brought back a total of 382 kilograms of Moon rock and soil, samples still being studied today.

The scientific return was enormous. The Moon rocks confirmed the giant impact hypothesis: the Moon formed from debris ejected when a Mars-sized body struck early Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago. That hypothesis would take decades more to gain full acceptance, but Apollo provided the evidence.

**Apollo-Soyuz, 1975**

The Space Race had an unexpected epilogue. In July 1975, an American Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz capsule docked in orbit. The symbolism was deliberate — the mission was called the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and it included an exchange of gifts, a handshake in orbit, and joint experiments. Nixon and Brezhnev had signed SALT I in 1972; détente was real, at least for a few years.

Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov shook hands through the docking tunnel. Leonov — the man who had performed the first spacewalk in 1965 — had spent years being the public face of Soviet cosmonautics. The handshake was photographed and circulated globally.

**What the race actually produced**

The Space Race's technological spillovers are often overstated and occasionally fabricated. Tang was invented years before NASA; NASA just popularized it through its meal program. The same is true of Velcro.

What the race genuinely accelerated: integrated circuit miniaturization (NASA was the primary early buyer of transistors and ICs, helping drive costs down), satellite communications (Telstar 1 launched in 1962, global live television followed), GPS (derived from military satellite positioning work), CAT scanners (image reconstruction algorithms originally developed for Apollo), and scratch-resistant lenses (developed for NASA helmet visors and later licensed to eyeglass manufacturers).

The subtler inheritance is harder to measure. The Apollo program employed 400,000 people at its peak. It required solving engineering problems that didn't have textbook answers. It produced a generation of engineers and scientists who went on to everything else.

And it ended. Nixon canceled the last three planned Apollo missions in 1970, redirecting resources toward the Space Shuttle. The decision was driven by cost, political priorities, and the absence of a new Soviet threat. With the race won, the urgency collapsed.

The Moon has been empty of humans ever since.

After Apollo: What the Space Race Left Behind

// COMMENTS

ON THIS PAGE