Seeker and Vintage Space look back at Apollo 17 and ahead to Artemis for Moon Day

Happy National Moon Day! I complete my retrospective of Apollo missions 50 years later with Seeker asking Why Did NASA Cancel the Apollo Program?

NASA had grand plans for the Moon during the Apollo program, but those dreams were cut short a few years after the first landing. Apollo 17 would mark the last time humans ventured to the Moon.
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The path to the moon traced a dangerous line of risk and reward. In a race against time, the Apollo Program challenged our scientific capabilities and redefined the boundaries of humanity. To celebrate NASA’s 60 years of exploration, Seeker is going back in time to relive each Apollo mission, taking viewers on a ride to an entirely new world.

Three things struck me about this video, the Big Blue Marble photo, the three canceled Apollo missions, and NASA's plans to return to the moon. I'm being a good environmentalist by recycling the importance of the Blue Marble from The end of an era: last space shuttle mission, when I quoted Indiana University's AHR examines ‘Earthrise era,’ symbols of Argentine cultural identity.

Hear the word "Earth," and the images likely to flash through the mind are descendants of two views afforded by the Apollo missions. One, a photograph called "Earthrise," shows Earth half-cloaked in shadow above a lifeless moonscape. A second, "Blue Marble," reveals our planet suspended alone in the void; it is reputed to be the most widely disseminated photograph in history.

Such views of Earth, it has been argued, prompted a revolution in the global imagination and a new appreciation for the beauty and fragility of the planet. But Benjamin Lazier, associate professor of history at Reed College, writing in the June 2011 issue of the American Historical Review, questions whether the Apollo images did indeed prompt such a revolution. And if so, he asks, to what ends?

Lazier supplements accounts of the Cold War origins and environmentalist afterlives of the "Earthrise era" with a history of philosophical responses to the earliest images of Earth from space. He focuses on thinkers -- including Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Hans Blumenberg -- who were troubled by the displacement of local, earthbound horizons with horizons that are planetary in scope and scale.

"Their example … prompts us to ask whether the visions and vocabularies of the Earthrise era have inadvertently accelerated our planetary emergency as much as they have inspired us to slow it down," he writes in "Earthrise; or, The Globalization of the World Picture."

Yes, the environmental era and the era of space travel not only coincide, they directly feed into one another. After all, I consider the use of "the planet" to describe Earth as a shibboleth of the environmental movement, and that use comes directly from space travel, as described above.

The emotional importance of that image may supercede all the scientific findings from the final Apollo mission to the Moon.

Amy Shira Teitel of The Vintage Space examined the canceled missions in Missions we Lost When Apollo was Cancelled.

Long before Apollo landed on the Moon, NASA leadership was looking at some lofty plans for Apollo hardware after the Moon.

"At least we got Skylab." It's the 50th anniversary of that program, too. Let's see if I get inspired enough to write more about it.

I return to Seeker explaning How NASA Plans to Return to the Moon.

NASA hasn't sent humans back to the Moon in almost 50 years, but in the next decade, the agency has ambitious plans for a lunar revival.

NASA's plans to return to the Moon have been moving ahead during the past four years. The successful test flight of the Orion capsule around the Moon was one of the reasons I declared that 2022 has been another great year in space. Stephen Colbert interviews the Artemis II crew for Yuri's Night covered the next step. After that, landing on the Moon again. Here's to my covering the Artemis II mission for next year's Moon Day!