Harrison "Jack" Schmitt wasn't supposed to be there. At least, not originally. For years, the pilot-heavy culture of NASA pushed back against the idea of sending a professional geologist to the lunar surface. They wanted "stick-and-rudder" men. But the scientific community revolted, and eventually, Schmitt replaced Joe Engle on the roster. In December 1972, he and Gene Cernan spent three days living in a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon. It was the last Apollo moon mission, and honestly, we haven’t been back since.
That's wild to think about.
We had the tech, the momentum, and the hardware for Apollo 18, 19, and 20. The Saturn V rockets were basically built. But the money dried up, the public got bored, and the political will evaporated like water in a vacuum. Apollo 17 wasn't just a finale; it was a frantic attempt to squeeze every drop of science out of the program before the lights went out for fifty years.
The Orange Soil and Other Weird Finds at Taurus-Littrow
The landing site was a narrow valley called Taurus-Littrow. It was chosen because it offered a bit of everything: old mountainous material and younger volcanic flow. Cernan and Schmitt weren't just "walking" around. They were driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) like madmen, covering over 22 miles of ground.
At one point, Schmitt yelled out, "Wait a minute! There is orange soil!"
It sounds like a small thing. It wasn't. In a world of monochromatic grays and blacks, a patch of bright orange was an anomaly that blew their minds. They thought they’d found evidence of recent volcanic activity—fumaroles venting gas from a still-warm lunar interior. Later analysis back on Earth by teams at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) showed it was actually tiny beads of volcanic glass formed 3.5 billion years ago.
- They collected 243 pounds of rock and soil.
- The "Goodwill Rock" was picked up here—a fragment of which was eventually distributed to 135 countries.
- Schmitt remains the only actual scientist to ever set foot on the Moon.
While Schmitt was hammering at rocks, Gene Cernan was dealing with the reality that he was the commander of a "dying" program. He knew the weight of it. You can hear it in his voice during the transcripts. He wasn't just a pilot anymore; he was a curator of humanity’s last steps on another world.
Why We Stopped: The Hard Truth About the Budget
People love a good conspiracy theory. "The aliens told us to stay away," or "We found something scary."
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Nope. It was just math.
By 1972, the Vietnam War was hemorrhaging cash, and the American public's "Space Race" fever had broken. Once we beat the Soviets to the Moon with Apollo 11, the average taxpayer stopped caring. NASA's budget, which peaked at about 4% of the federal budget in the mid-60s, began a steep decline.
The hardware for the next three missions was repurposed. One Saturn V became the launch vehicle for Skylab. Others became museum pieces, rusting in the Florida humidity or sitting in giant hangars in Houston and Alabama. It’s a tragedy of missed opportunity. We had the infrastructure to build a lunar base by 1980. Instead, we pivoted to the Space Shuttle—a "truck" designed to stay in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
Life Inside the Lunar Module "Challenger"
Imagine living in a space the size of a walk-in closet with another grown man for three days. You can't shower. You’re eating dehydrated cubes. Everything smells like spent gunpowder.
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That’s the part people forget. Lunar dust is nasty. Because there’s no wind or water to erode it, moon dust is essentially tiny shards of glass and silica. It’s abrasive. It ate through the outer layers of the astronauts' boots. It jammed the joints of their suits. Schmitt actually suffered from "lunar hay fever"—a physical allergic reaction to the dust they tracked back into the LM.
It was cramped. It was smelly. It was dangerous.
If something went wrong with the ascent engine, they were dead. There was no rescue ship. No "Plan B." They had to trust that a single engine, which had never been fired in space before that moment, would lift them off the surface and meet up with Ron Evans in the Command Module America orbiting above.
The Fender Incident
You’ve probably seen the photo. A lunar rover with a makeshift fender made of maps and duct tape.
Early in the mission, Cernan accidentally ripped off the rear fender with a hammer. This was a crisis. Without the fender, the rover’s wheels would kick up a "rooster tail" of that abrasive dust, coating the astronauts and the equipment. It would have overheated the batteries and blinded the crew.
The fix? They used four plastic-coated "chronogram" maps, some light-clamping Tool B clamps, and—of course—grey duct tape. It worked. It’s the ultimate "human" moment of the mission. No matter how much high-tech gear you have, sometimes you just need tape and a map.
The Long Shadow of the Last Apollo Moon Mission
When Gene Cernan stepped off the ladder for the last time, he said, "We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind."
He thought we’d be back in ten years. It took over fifty.
The legacy of Apollo 17 is found in the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility in Houston. Scientists are still opening vacuum-sealed tubes from this mission today. Why wait? Because the technology we have in 2026 to analyze these rocks didn't exist in 1972. We are literally using "future tech" to answer questions Cernan and Schmitt didn't even know to ask.
For example, we now know there is water ice in the shadowed craters of the lunar poles. We know the Moon has a "lunar exosphere." We know it's not a dead rock, but a complex world with a history linked to our own.
What You Can Do Now
If you want to actually understand the scope of what we lost when the Apollo program ended, don't just watch a documentary. Do the following:
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- Check the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) gallery. You can see high-resolution photos of the Apollo 17 landing site taken from orbit. You can actually see the rover tracks. They are still there. No wind to blow them away.
- Read the "Apollo Lunar Surface Journal." This is a NASA-maintained archive of every single word spoken on the Moon. It’s raw, funny, and incredibly human. You’ll see the astronauts joking, swearing, and geeking out over rocks.
- Visit a Saturn V. Go to the Kennedy Space Center or the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Stand under the F-1 engines. When you see the size of the machine required to send three people to the Moon, the "why don't we just go back?" question starts to make sense. It was a massive, expensive, heroic undertaking.
- Follow the Artemis program. We are finally heading back. Artemis III is slated to land humans near the lunar South Pole. It’s not just a "repeat" of Apollo; it’s about staying this time.
The last Apollo moon mission wasn't an end. It was a pause button. It took us half a century to find the "play" button again, but the data collected by Cernan and Schmitt is the foundation for everything we are doing today. They did the hard work. They proved we could live on another world. Now, it's just a matter of going back to finish what they started.