Thread by @studentactivism

I was just looking up how many times humans have landed craft on the moon since Apollo, and stumbled across this—the first image ever made of the far side.

It literally is, old man.

Someone in replies to Candace Owens' moon-landing-is-a-hoax thread was asking why we'd never gone back since Apollo, and I was curious about the number.

Ten times. We've sent spacecraft to the moon ten times since the last Apollo mission, most recently fourteen months ago. And that's not counting orbiters, flybys, or the one time we crashed a ship into the moon on purpose because we wanted to see what it would look like.

The Soviets went four times, all in the seventies. China has gone four times, all in the last decade. And India and Israel have gone once each. (Both of those last two were in 2019, and both ships crashed.)

And that in turn answers the question of why we haven't sent people back. Going to the moon is difficult and expensive, and the moon isn't all that exciting. You go to the moon so you can say you've been, and when you can say you've been you stop going.

That's beginning to change, finally—China's recent landings are slated to be the first in a big wave, including a bunch that are planned by private companies. (We'll see how many actually happen, but there are a LOT scheduled.)

But for a long time, there just wasn't any compelling reason to go back, so nobody did. No big conspiracy.

(Addendum: It's nine moon landings since Apollo, not ten. For some reason Wikipedia gives China's 2013 lander/rover mission two lines in its chart, even though other lander/rover missions are combined into one.)

As for the prospects of new crewed landings, NASA claims it's sending a woman to the moon in 2025 on Artemis 3, but I'll believe it when I see it. Nobody else has any plans for this decade, as far as I can tell.

Which in turn brings up something I've been kind of obsessed with for a while.

In the history of humanity, twelve people have ever walked on the moon. Eight of them are dead. Of the remaining four, the youngest, Charles Duke, is 86 years old.

So unless someone hustles back in the pretty near future, the window of time in which there are people walking on earth who have walked on the moon is going to be closing soon.

Cool news: Just an uncrewed orbiter, but the first step toward getting us back on the ground. And it's scheduled to head out in less than two months.

https://twitter.com/gerrycanavan/status/1487452492493475848