12 men have walked on the moon and only four of them are still alive.
Buzz Aldrin is 96 years old.
David Scott is 94.
Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmitt are both 91.
These four men saw things up there that most of us can hardly believe.
They saw a sky that was pitch black in the middle of the day.
They saw the earth hang in one spot and never move.
They felt the ground shake and they left behind a machine that made the whole moon ring like a giant bell for almost an hour.
They shut their eyes in the dark and still saw bright flashes of light streaking in from deep space.
They smelled a dust that reminded them of burnt gunpowder.
And that dust was made of tiny sharp pieces of glass.
And one of them kicked the ground and found bright orange dirt on a world that was gray in every direction.
That orange dirt held a secret that changed what we know about the moon.
All of this happened more than 50 years ago and since then not one person has gone back.
Just days ago, NASA said the next footsteps on the moon are now planned for 2028 at the earliest.
These four men are very old and time is running out.
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Now, what did these men really see up there? Why did the moon ring like a bell? What was hiding inside that orange dirt? And will any of them live long enough to watch someone else walk where they walked? Before we go on, here is a number that shows how rare this is.
Only 24 people in all of history have ever traveled to the moon.
12 of them walked on it.
The other 12 flew around it and stayed up in space while their friends went down.
Of those 12 who walked, eight have already died.
Neil Armstrong passed away in 2012.
Gene Cernan, the last man to leave the moon, passed away in 2017.
John Young and Alan Bean both died in 2018.
The others are gone, too.
That leaves Aldrin, Scott, Duke, and Schmitt.
They are the last people alive who know what it feels like to stand on another world.
So, when they talk about what they saw, we should listen closely.
Some of what they say sounds like science fiction.
But, every single piece of it is true and a lot of it has been checked again and again by scientists over the years.
The story starts with the youngest of the four, and he was not on the moon the first time.
In July of 1969, Charlie Duke was a 33-year-old Air Force pilot who had only just become an astronaut.
He was sitting at a desk in Houston in a room called Mission Control.
His job was a big one.
He was the capsule communicator, which means he was the one person allowed to talk to the astronauts out in space.
When Apollo 11 came down to the moon, Duke was the voice that answered.
The crew said, “Tranquility Base here.
The Eagle has landed”.
Duke tried to say back that they copied the message, but his tongue got twisted and he said “Tranquility” wrong.
Then he added a line that millions of people heard.
He told the crew that a bunch of guys in Houston were about to turn blue and that they were breathing again.
That wrong word became one of the most famous slips in the history of space travel.
Those men in Houston had a good reason to turn blue.
The landing was not smooth at all.
As the lander came down, alarms went off on the computer.
The computer was getting too much information at once, and no one had seen that alarm before.
Then Neil Armstrong looked out the window and saw that the lander was headed toward a field full of huge rocks and a big crater.
If they landed there, the lander could tip over and then they could never take off again.
So, Armstrong took control with his own hands and flew the lander past the rocks looking for a flat spot.
All of this took time, and time meant fuel.
By the moment the lander touched down, there was less than a minute of fuel left in the tank.
If they had run out, they would have crashed.
Back on Earth, hundreds of millions of people were listening, and a young rookie named Charlie Duke was the one who got to tell the whole world that the men were safe.
Less than 3 years later, in April of 1972, Duke got his own turn.
He climbed down a ladder onto the moon with a man named John Young.
Duke was only 36 years old, and that made him the youngest person to ever walk on the moon.
He still holds that record today.
What he stepped into did not look like any place on Earth.
The first thing that hit him was the sky.
The sun was out, and it was blazing bright, but the sky above him was not blue.
It was black, as black as the middle of the night.
On Earth, the sky is blue because air scatters sunlight and spreads the blue color all around.
The moon has no air, so there is nothing to scatter the light and daytime looks exactly like space.
The astronauts could stand in bright sunshine and look straight up into darkness.
It was a bright day and a night sky at the same time and nothing on Earth could have prepared them for that.
Here is something strange that comes from this.
In almost every photo taken on the moon, you cannot see a single star.
For more than 50 years, some people have used that to say the moon landings were fake.
They asked how there could be no stars in space, but the answer is simple and it is just what the science says should happen.
The moon’s ground is very bright in the sun, like a sunny beach.
The cameras had to be set for that bright light, so they took in very little of it.
Stars are very faint.
A camera set for a sunny beach cannot catch faint dots of light.
It is the same reason you cannot see the stars when you stand in a bright stadium at night.
The lights are so strong that they wash out the sky.
So, the missing stars are not a sign of a trick.
They are a sign that the pictures are real.
And above all that blackness hanging in the sky was the Earth.
It was blue and white and it looked almost four times wider than the moon looks to us from here.
But the strangest part was that it never moved.
On Earth, the sun and moon rise and set, but the moon always shows the same face to us, so the Earth stays in the same part of the sky.
For a man standing on the moon, the Earth stayed in one place for the whole trip.
It did not rise.
It did not set.
It just hung there like a lamp.
Neil Armstrong once said that he held up his thumb and covered the whole Earth with it.
All of the people, all of the oceans and every country he had ever heard of were hidden behind one thumb.
He said it did not make him feel like a giant.
He said it made him feel very, very small.
The light on the moon played other tricks, too.
The astronauts landed in the lunar morning when the sun was still low in the sky.
This was no accident.
A day on the moon lasts about 2 weeks and in the middle of it, the ground gets as hot as 250°F, which is hotter than boiling water.
At night, it falls to about 200° below zero.
So, the landings were planned for the cool part of the day.
Because the sun set so low, the shadows were long and sharp and pitch black.
If you stepped into one, it looked like a hole in the ground.
The astronauts also noticed that the ground glowed brighter around the shadow of their own heads.
And it was as if their shadows were wearing a halo.
This happens because the tiny bumps in the dust throw light straight back at the sun.
It is a small thing, but every one of the walkers noticed it and none of them had ever seen it before.
Walking on the moon was nothing like walking at home.
The moon is much smaller than the Earth, so it’s pull is much weaker.
Gravity on the moon is only about 1/6 as strong.
A man in a heavy space suit and backpack, who would weigh around 180 lb here, weighed only about 30 lb there.
That made every move feel odd.
The men found that walking felt clumsy, so they started to hop like bunnies because it was easier.
They could jump much higher than they ever could at home.
John Young once leaped into the air and saluted the flag as he rose.
But there was a catch.
A body that weighs less does not stop on a dime.
It takes a while to turn and a while to slow down.
The men fell down quite often and getting back up in a stiff bulky suit was hard work.
A tear in the suit could be deadly, so even a simple fall was a real danger.
Two of the most famous words ever said about the moon came from Buzz Aldrin.
He was the second man to step off the ladder in 1969.
He looked around at the gray plain, the black sky, and the bare hills far away and he said, “Beautiful view.
Magnificent sight out here.
Magnificent desolation”.
The word desolation means a place that is empty and lonely.
Nobody has ever found a better way to describe it.
On the moon, there is no wind.
There are no clouds.
There is no water, no tree, and no bird.
And there is no sound because sound needs air to travel through and there is no air.
The only thing the men could hear was the hum of the fans inside their own suits.
Everything outside was perfectly quiet.
It was the most still and silent place that a human being had ever been.
And it was beautiful and scary at once.
But Aldrin saw something change before he left.
When the top half of the lander fired its engine to carry the men home, the blast from the engine kicked up a storm of dust and rocks.
Aldrin was watching through the window, and he saw the flag they had planted fall over.
More than 40 years later, a NASA spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter flew above the landing sites and took pictures.
At five of the six sites, the flags were still standing, and they cast long shadows.
But at Apollo 11, where Aldrin’s flag had been, there was no shadow at all.
The flag really had fallen, just as he said it did.
That was one more proof that the stories these men told were true, and that the moon was holding onto the marks they left.
The moon is the best place in the solar system to leave a mark.
A footprint on Earth is gone after the next rain or the next windy day.
But on the moon, there is no rain and no wind.
Nothing is there to wipe the ground clean.
The only thing that slowly erodes it is a rain of tiny space rocks that hit very, very slowly over a very long time.
So, the prints left by the astronauts could last for millions of years.
Armstrong’s first step is still there.
Aldrin’s boot marks are still there.
If a person were to land at that site today, they could walk right up and put a boot in the same spots.
The men who made those prints may be gone soon, but the prints themselves will outlive all of us.
There was a third man on that very first trip, and he never touched the ground.
His name was Michael Collins, and he stayed behind in the ship that circled the moon.
Every time he flew behind the moon, he lost all contact with Earth.
For about 48 minutes in each loop, the whole moon stood between him and every other human being.
No one could hear him, and he could not hear anyone.
He was farther from home than any man had ever been.
People back on Earth called him the loneliest man in history.
But Collins said he never felt that way.
He said he felt calm, and he felt awake.
He felt proud to be part of the trip.
And uh when he came out from behind the moon, he heard the voice of Mission Control crackle back on the radio.
And that was the first time in almost an hour that he heard anyone else.
Now we come to the strangest thing the Apollo men ever did, and they did it without meaning to.
In November of 1969, a pair of astronauts named Pete Conrad and Alan Bean flew Apollo 12 to the moon.
They landed so close to a robot ship called Surveyor 3, which had landed there 2 years earlier, that they could walk right up to it.
They took pieces of it home to study.
When their trip was over, they let the empty lander, the part they no longer needed, fall back and crash into the moon on purpose.
NASA had left special instruments on the ground that could feel any shaking.
These were called seismometers.
The scientists expected the shaking to die away in a few minutes, but it did not.
The moon kept shaking.
It kept shaking for almost an hour.
One scientist said it was like hitting a bell with a hammer and watching the bell ring and ring.
Nobody knew what to make of this at first.
On Earth, if a big rock hits the ground, the shaking dies out fast because our planet is full of water and soft damp rock that soaks up the shaking.
But the moon kept ringing.
Later, NASA let a huge rocket stage from Apollo 13 hit the moon, and that time, the shaking went on for more than 3 hours.
The best answer scientists found is that the outer layer of the moon is dry, hard, and full of cracks from billions of years of space rocks hitting it.
When shaking enters a dry, cracked place, it bounces around for a long time and does not fade.
The seismometers also felt real moonquakes, and some of them were caused by the Earth.
Our planet pulls on the moon the way the moon pulls on our oceans, and that pull can make the moon shake.
That means the moon is not a dead place at all.
It is still moving even now.
Now, let us go to the man who made the next big trip, David Scott.
In July of 1971, Scott and a man named Jim Irwin flew Apollo 15 down to a place called Hadley, at the foot of a range of mountains called the Apennines.
This time, NASA had given the crew something new.
They had a car.
It was called the lunar rover, and it folded up like a lawn chair inside the lander.
Before Scott even drove it, he stepped off the ladder and said that there was a basic truth about humans, and that truth was that man must explore.
Then, he drove it.
Over the next 3 days, he and Irwin drove about 17 mi across the moon.
For the first time, people could go far from the lander to find new places.
It was the first car ever driven on another world, and it changed how much they could see and do.
But, the rover ran into a strange problem that no one had trained for.
On Earth, far away mountains look pale and a little blue.
That is because the air between you and the mountain makes things look fuzzy.
Your brain uses that fuzziness to guess how far away something is.
On the moon, there is no air, so there is no fuzziness.
A mountain many miles away looks as sharp as a rock sitting at your feet.
The mountain beside Scott and Irwin was about 15,000 ft high, and it looked close enough to walk to.
A rock that looked like it was a few steps away might be a mile away.
The men could not tell how far anything was.
They had to rely on their maps and their instruments because their own eyes lied to them.
It was one more way the moon felt like a different world.
While they were out driving, Scott spotted a rock sitting alone on top of a small pile of dirt as if someone had placed it there on purpose.
It was white and shiny, which was odd on a gray moon.
He and Irwin picked it up, and he said they had found something special.
They had.
The rock turned out to be more than 4 billion years old, almost as old as the moon itself.
It was a piece of the moon’s first crust from the time when the moon was a ball of hot, melted rock that was just starting to cool.
People gave it a nickname, the Genesis Rock, because it was a piece of the moon’s very beginning.
When Scott picked it up, he was holding a piece of the early solar system.
And all of this started with a man who just happened to look to his left at the right time.
Near the end of his last moonwalk, Scott did something that millions of people watched on TV.
He stood in front of the camera and held up two things.
In his right hand was a geologist’s hammer, and in his left hand was a falcon feather.
A falcon is a bird.
He said he would drop the two of them at the same moment, and he hoped they would land together.
Then he let go.
And the hammer and the feather fell side by side and hit the ground at the very same time.
“How about that?” he said.
“Proves that Mr. Galileo was correct.
About 400 years before, a scientist named Galileo said that all objects fall at the same speed if nothing slows them down.
On Earth, the air slows the feather.
On the Moon, there’s no air, so there was nothing to slow it.
Scott proved it live from about 240,000 mi away.
Before he left, Scott did one more thing that most people do not know about.
He and Irwin placed a tiny metal figure on the ground in the shape of an astronaut in a space suit.
It is called the fallen astronaut.
Next to it, they left a small plaque with the names of 14 astronauts and cosmonauts who had died while working on space travel.
There was no big speech, and they did not make a show of it.
They just set it down in the dust and left.
Today, it is still there, lying on the ground at Hadley.
A very small statue that honors a very large group of people.
It is the only memorial of its kind on any other world.
It is one of the quietest things anyone has ever done on the Moon.
Now, let us talk about the strangest thing that happened inside the astronauts’ own heads.
Starting with Apollo 11, the crews began to report something odd.
When they closed their eyes in the dark ship, they saw flashes of light.
Sometimes the flashes looked like little dots, and sometimes like thin streaks or tiny clouds.
This happened about once every few minutes.
At first, nobody knew why.
Some people wondered if the men were just tired, but then the flashes were tested on later trips, and the answer was both simple and wild.
They came from space itself.
Out there, tiny pieces of atoms called cosmic rays fly through space at almost the speed of light.
On Earth, our air and magnetic shield block almost all of them.
But once the astronauts left that shield, the cosmic rays flew right through the ship and right through their eyes.
Each time one hit, they saw a flash.
That means that every one of those men was being hit by particles from far across the galaxy.
These particles came from exploded stars and from places no one has ever visited.
They passed through the walls of the ship, through the men’s skulls, and through their eyes, and their eyes took notice.
Nothing hurt them.
They just saw sparks inside the dark.
Some of the men later said it was beautiful, like watching little fireworks on the inside of their eyelids.
But scientists also learned something serious from it.
If people spend a long time in deep space, those rays can hurt the body.
That is one reason NASA is so careful about planning long trips, and why it is learning how to build better shields for the men and women who go next.
By April of 1972, Charlie Duke and John Young were ready for their own big adventure.
They landed Apollo 16 in a rough area called the Descartes Highlands.
They had a rover, too, and they had fun with it.
Young took it for a speed run that the crew called the Grand Prix.
As the wheels spun, the moon’s dust shot up behind them in a fan shape, like a rooster’s tail.
On Earth, dust would float in the air.
On the moon, with no air to hold it up, every grain flew up in a perfect curve and fell straight back down.
It looked like a movie playing in slow motion.
The two men also climbed up to a huge rock the size of a house, and Duke called it Big Muley.
They broke off pieces of it for scientists to study back on Earth.
There was one small mishap on that trip that is worth telling.
While Young was walking near a science experiment, he caught his boot on a cable that was lying on the ground.
The cable snapped right out of the machine, and the experiment, which was meant to measure heat flowing out of the moon, was ruined.
Young felt terrible about it.
Duke and everyone back home knew it was an honest mistake.
In a suit as bulky as theirs, with a helmet that blocked most of the view downward, it was easy to trip on something small.
It showed just how hard the work was.
Every job was done in thick gloves and stiff boots while carrying a heavy pack.
Mistakes like this one were bound to happen.
Now, let us talk about the thing that every moon walker mentioned, and that nearly ruined the whole program.
It was the dust.
The dust on the moon is not like sand at the beach.
On Earth, wind and water roll the grains around and make them smooth.
On the moon, there’s no wind and no water.
So, the grains are sharp and jagged.
They were made by billions of years of space rocks smashing into the ground, and many are tiny shards of glass.
The dust also has a static charge, so it sticks to everything.
Within minutes, the white space suits were gray from the knees down.
It stuck to the visors and scratched them.
It worked its way into the joints and the seals and wore them down.
Some of the men said that by the end of their trips, the dust was starting to damage their suits.
The dust also caused trouble on the last trip, Apollo 17.
Gene Cernan was working near the rover when his hammer caught the edge of one of the fenders and broke part of it off.
Without that fender, the rover’s wheels flung dust all over the men and the machine.
They had a real problem.
In the end, they fixed it with duct tape and a few paper maps clipped together.
It worked.
Duct tape had saved the day on the moon, just as it had saved the day on Apollo 13.
But it was a clear lesson.
The dust was a bigger threat than anyone had guessed, and any future base on the moon would have to find a way to deal with it.
And then came the smell.
People often ask how anyone could smell the moon through a sealed space suit.
The answer is that they did not smell it outside.
They smelled it afterward.
When the men climbed back into the lander and took off their helmets, the dust they had carried in filled the cabin.
And it had a smell.
Gene Cernan said it smelled like spent gunpowder, like the air after a firework goes off.
Many of the other astronauts said the same thing.
It is one of the strangest facts about the moon.
Nobody knows for sure why the dust smells that way.
It may be because the dust, which had been sealed away from air for billions of years, was suddenly meeting oxygen inside the cabin.
It was a smell no one on Earth had ever smelled before.
And the dust did something else.
It made Harrison Schmitt sick.
After his first moonwalk, his nose swelled up and his throat got scratchy, and he sneezed.
He called it lunar hay fever.
Schmitt was not like the other men on the moon.
He was the only professional scientist ever to walk there.
He was a geologist, which means a person who studies rocks and the history of the Earth.
All the other moonwalkers had been pilots, and they were taught geology so they could pick up the right rocks.
But Schmitt already knew it.
He went on the very last trip, Apollo 17 in December of 1972.
NASA had fought hard to send a real scientist, and in the end, they made it happen.
It turned out to be a very smart choice.
On his second day of walking at a crater called Shorty, Schmidt kicked the ground and stopped in his tracks.
He said, “Wait a minute.
Hold on.
There is orange soil”.
Cernan was close by, and Schmidt told him not to move his foot until he could see it.
The soil was orange.
It was bright rusty orange on a world that had been gray in every direction for as long as the men had been there.
Schmidt could not believe his eyes at first.
He thought it might be rust or something that had burned.
They scooped up a sample and took it home.
Cernan and Schmidt knew it was a big find, but it took years for the scientists to see just how big.
The little patch of orange dirt turned out to be one of the most important things ever found on the moon.
Under a microscope, the orange soil turned out to be made of millions of tiny glass beads.
They were frozen drops of lava.
About 3 and 1/2 billion years ago, a volcano on the moon had shot a fountain of fire high into the sky.
The lava broke apart into tiny drops that cooled so fast they turned into glass before they hit the ground.
The orange color came from a metal called titanium.
For many years, that was all the scientists thought the beads could tell them.
The moon was supposed to be bone dry.
The first tests on the Apollo rocks had found almost no water, so people believed the moon had always been dry.
Then, in 2008, a team at Brown University led by a scientist named Alberto Saal looked at the same kind of volcanic glass again using a tool that was much more sensitive than anything that was around in the 1970s.
And they found water.
A tiny bit of it was locked inside the glass.
A few years later, in 2011, a scientist named Erik Hauri from the Carnegie Institution and his team looked even deeper.
They studied tiny pockets of melted rock that were trapped inside crystals in Schmidt’s orange beads before the volcano erupted.
Those pockets held about 100 times more water than earlier guesses.
In some places, the moon’s insides had as much water as parts of the rock deep under our own planet.
It was a shock to the whole field.
It meant that the moon had water inside it from the very beginning.
All that time, the answer had been sitting on a shelf in a sample that a geologist had picked up with his own hands in 1972.
So, what did the astronauts see that mattered the most? It was not the Earth in the sky, as beautiful as that was.
It was not the black sky or the long shadows.
It was a handful of orange dirt, and that dirt pointed to something even bigger.
Later, spacecraft in orbit found ice hiding at the bottom of deep craters near the moon’s poles.
These craters are so deep that the sun never reaches the bottom.
It has been dark and freezing there for billions of years, and the ice has been safe the whole time.
In 2009, NASA sent a rocket crashing into one of those craters on purpose, and the cloud of dust that rose up was full of water.
The ice was real.
Scientists could not wait to find out how much was there.
This ice is a big deal for one simple reason.
It can be turned into drinking water.
It can be split into oxygen, which people need to breathe.
And it can be turned into fuel for rockets.
A future base on the moon could make its own water, air, and fuel from the ground.
It would not have to carry all of that from Earth, which costs a huge amount of money.
This is exactly why NASA’s new plan is aimed at the moon’s south pole, where much of the ice sits.
So, the orange dirt that the geologist kicked up in 1972 is part of the reason we’re going back.
The next question is whether the men who were there will live to see it.
That brings us to a question that people ask all the time.
If three men could drive a car on the moon in 1971, why can we not do it again today? The honest answer is money and risk.
In 1966, NASA got more than 4 cents out of every dollar the government spent.
Today, it gets about 4/10 of 1 cent.
The Apollo program cost more than 25 billion dollars at the time.
That is more than 250 billion dollars in today’s money.
And it gave jobs to about 400,000 people.
All of that money was spent because the United States was in a race with the Soviet Union, and nobody wanted to lose.
But once the race was won, the money began to leave.
By the time Scott drove his rover, NASA had already cut Apollo 18, 19, and 20.
The rockets for those trips had already been built and they were never used.
The other reason is risk.
In 1967, a fire on the launch pad killed the three astronauts of Apollo 1.
In April of 1970, Apollo 13 lost its oxygen tank halfway to the moon and nearly killed three more men.
Even though those men came home safe, it was a very close call.
And back then, the country was willing to take big risks to win.
Today, no space agency would accept the same odds.
People expect every launch to be safe and that is a good thing.
But it also means it takes more time, more testing, and more money to do the same job.
So, even though we have much better computers today, going back to the moon has turned out to be slow and hard.
Now, let us look at the new plan.
On October 23rd, NASA’s leader, Jared Isaacman and his team laid out the schedule.
Artemis 3, planned for the middle of 2027, will not land on the moon at all.
It will stay in orbit around the Earth and practice docking with two new landers.
One is built by SpaceX and the other is built by Blue Origin.
The real landings come after that.
Artemis 4 and Artemis 5 are both planned for 2028 and both landers still have to prove themselves by landing on the moon without a crew first.
This plan has slipped again and again.
The first landing was once promised for 2024.
Now, it is 2028 and it could easily slip even further.
Let us do the math on what that means for our four men.
By 2028, Buzz Aldrin will be 98 years old.
David Scott will be 95 or 96.
Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmitt will be 92 or 93.
It is possible that they will all be here to watch, but it is not a sure thing.
Eight of the 12 moonwalkers are already gone.
Since Gene Cernan climbed the ladder for the last time in December of 1972, no human being has stood on the moon.
That is almost 54 years.
A whole generation of people has been born, grown up, and had children of their own and not one of them has seen a person walk on the moon.
The ones who did are slipping away from us.
What the Apollo men left behind is still there.
From above, NASA’s camera has spotted the lower halves of the landers, the tracks of the rovers, and even the paths of the men’s footprints.
They also left golf balls, hammers, boots, and a plaque on the Apollo 11 lander that says the men came in peace for all mankind.
They even left behind about 96 bags of waste.
That might sound gross, but it was planned.
Every pound they left behind meant one more pound of moon rock they could carry home.
In all, the Apollo crews brought back around 840 lb of rocks and dirt.
Scientists are still studying those samples today, and they are still finding new things in them more than 50 years later.
And at five of the six landing sites, the flags are still standing and casting shadows.
The scientist in charge of the NASA camera thinks the flags are badly faded by now after more than 50 years of raw sunlight with nothing to protect them.
They may have turned white.
At the press talk, Jared Isaacman said that visiting an Apollo site would be very cool at some point in the future.
But, the first landings will not go to those places.
They are headed for the South Pole, which is more than 1,000 mi from any of the Apollo sites.
So, the flags, the footprints, and the rovers may sit untouched for years to come waiting for a visitor who is not in a hurry.
There is one thing out there that no camera in orbit will ever be able to see.
Before Apollo 16, Charlie Duke had a photo taken of his family.
It showed his wife and his two young sons, a normal family picture.
On the back, he wrote a note.
It said this was the family of astronaut Duke from the planet Earth who landed on the moon in April of 1972.
His wife and his boys signed their names beneath it.
On the moon, Duke set the photo down on the ground and took a picture of it.
He said later that he wanted his family to be a part of the trip, and he never picked it up again.
It is still there today lying in the dust of the Descartes’s Highlands 54 years later.
The sun has probably faded it by now, but it is still a family portrait from planet Earth waiting for the next visitor.
And the man who left it is 91 old.
So, here is what the Apollo astronauts really saw.
They saw a black sky in the middle of the day and an Earth that never moved.
They saw a moon that rang like a bell and a dust that smelled like gunpowder.
They saw flashes of light that came from the stars and a patch of orange dirt that held the secret of the moon’s water.
All of it was real and all of it is still there.
12 men saw the moon up close and four of them are still here to tell us what it was like.
Do you remember where you were when you watched them land? Tell us in the comments.
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Thanks for watching.
