SPACE RACE
One more giant leap
It’s 50 years since man last stepped onto the Moon, but a new space race is about to begin as we fire up rockets to search for precious rare metals and thrill billionaire tourists. It’s going to get busy up there...
by JONATHAN MARGOLIS
For anyone with memories of the Apollo Moon programme at its thrilling height, one of the saddest, yet most intriguing, pilgrimages in the world is to a little-known museum on Long Island, near New York City. There, at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, they display one of the Apollo Lunar Modules – the landing craft from which astronauts on the six manned American Moon landings from 1969 to 1972 stepped onto the Lunar surface.
Not that unusual, you may think – there’s a convincing replica of one in London’s Science Museum. But the exhibit on Long Island is the real spacecraft that was to have flown on the Apollo 18 mission. But for a decision by the US Congress to end the Apollo programme, it would have gone to the Moon.
As it is, the last Lunar Module to land, Apollo 17’s, blasted off from the Moon 50 years ago this 14 December, with Gene Cernan the final man up the ladder, and no human has been back since.
There were many reasons for abandoning Apollo. For one, the expenditure was seen as unsustainable – the programme accounted for 4% of the USA’s federal spending and had cost more than £228 billion in today’s money – more than the GDP of dozens of countries.