I watched the first manned lunar landing in 1969 on a low- definition television in a glass-enclosed back porch. As I followed the grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the dusty lunar soil, I could see the moon peeking through tree branches overhead. It looked as it always had, but somehow different. That sudden change in perspective was the whole point of the Apollo 11 landing. It wasn’t a scientific mission. It was an exercise of Cold War hubris intended to burnish America’s image and humble its Communist rival. With Armstrong’s one small first step, though, the space race was over, and the entire Apollo program rapidly wound down. The 1971 image of Alan Shepard hammering a golf ball across the moonscape with a six iron during Apollo 14 remains etched in the popular mind as the end of lunar exploration.
But ask a planetary scientist and you will get a different spin. Jeffrey Taylor of the University of Hawaii says it was the final Apollo missions of 1972 that propelled lunar science and transformed our understanding of the moon. The stars weren’t the guys in the space suits but the 842 pounds of rocks the astronauts brought back to Earth before their program was disbanded.
