What a shame we've never bothered to go back. More important to blow each other up, I suppose.

I remember Gene Cernan working on video camera and got it working. NASA asked what he did, he said "I hit it with my hammer"

The Blue Marble picture is timeless and awesome. Amazing how much water covers our planet.

I remember it well. I was there. The sky turned green.

December of 2022 isn't that far away. At the rate we are going, and with the uncertainty and lack of focus we are experiencing regarding our manned space exploration program, I'm afraid the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 mission will pass without any new footprints having been made on the Moon's surface by American astronauts.

How would our lives be today if after 20 or 30 flights the Wright brothers dismantled their airplane and no one else flew for the next 50 years?

Are we any better off now for not having continued our manned flights to the Moon, and perhaps beyond?

Will we sleep forever? America must awaken or we will find ourselves trailing behind the new leaders who *will* pick up the torch we long ago dropped.

Awaken, American spirit of exploration! Arise as you once did so long ago! I miss you.

I've always been awe struck by the "Blue Marble " picture but never knew it's history ...nice

question - why are there no stars in any of the pictures backgrounds- you would still be able to- see stars surely

That flight stood out, like the first flight to the moon. I can remember some of the highlights: a geologist looking at rocks, giving a reason to go to space beyond the Cold War; the "blue marble" and a reminder that we are the one inhabitable planet in the solar system, so we had better keep this planet healthy. The "Merry Merry month of December" was funny, but at the time, also a little bit of concern: there was a worry that the breathing apparatus had a problem. What made him sing was the low gravity; he found it fun to skip on the moon because each jump covered a lot of distance, and that was visible on television (something the moonshot deniers should notice).

I don't think of them as the last astronauts on the moon, but the most recent. It was a shock when my daughter saw videos of Neil Armstrong's moon landing in school, and I realized that another moon landing had not happened in her life. She is much older now, and my grandson has never seen a moon landing, and more and more funding is being cut, even though information from the space program is still coming to us. Look at the information from the asteroid projects and the xenon rocket. The space program is such a small part of our budget as is. It seems that every time budgets are cut, the space program suffers, schools suffer, and children have less and less to feel proud of.

I also want to put in a word for live planetarium shows. I do not like the new Robert Redford narrated planetarium show, because none of the images are clear and crisp the way that a live show is, and all the information has been dumbed down to the level of an elementary school TV show. It was exciting to hear a real expert at a planetarium (that a family had traveled a distance to see in person), and learn about the constellations, planets, stars, in great detail. So much information has been gathered that it deserves a good presentation.

It would really pay for us to see our Moon as a major source of space resources in the future. Indeed, our Moon could easily become the future source of endless energy for our precious planet. To this end, we really need to jointly establish an underground international lunar colony on the Moon. We could still have shielded greenhouses on the surface for the growing of large quantities of various foods. We also need to build an international trans-lunar shuttle in Earth orbit, using the ISS as a future construction platform. This trans-lunar space shuttle would use solar powered ion drive engines which rely upon ionized space trash as their throw mass as the means of getting to the Moon and back. The planets have been here for a long time, and they are still going to be here for a long time to come, but right now we need to focus on a permanent presence in space in the form of a future international lunar colony on our own Earth's Moon. I sincerely hope we can create a future International Space Agency (ISA) for the purpose of coordinating all of this future international space effort, and nothing would unite mankind here on Earth more than this kind of joint cooperation in space. - Rick Carter

Famous photo, but nothing about the film stock, ISO, f/stop...no love for the technology that captured the photo.

The who might be tough, but there should be a lot of info on the negative

Love ya' Allen, but this falls a bit short

That photograph also inspired one of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid, The Big Blue Marble. Here are the opening lyrics:

The earth's a Big Blue Marble
When you see it from out there
The sun and moon declare
Our beauty's very rare

Folks are folks and kids are kids
We share a common name
We speak a different way
But work and play the same

We sing pretty much alike
Enjoy spring pretty much alike
Peace and love we all understand
And laughter, we use the very same brand

Our differences, our problems
From out there there's not much trace
Our friendships they can place
While looking at the face

Of the Big Blue Marble in space

In 1969, I sat in my sisters living room with my Grandmother and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. My grandmother reminisced about her life as we watched. Her father took part in the run for Indian Territory in Oklahoma. She and her siblings stayed with relatives in St. Louis while her parents built a cabin to house them. She liked to stand in the window and watch the lamplighter come around with his horse and buggy to light the gas street lights. She was educated on the farm by an old Cherokee woman who had been to finishing school in Europe, but forced on the long 'trail of tears' march to Indian Territory in 1838-39. She lost all of her family on the way. My great grandfather eventually sold the farm and bought a store in town. Grandma married a farmer and moved back to Indian Territory where she raised nine children without the benefit of electricity. All their water was carried from the creek, light was provided by kerosene lanterns and homemade candles. My children, grandchildren and great grandchildren can never fully appreciate the grandeur of the moment as seen through my grandmother's eyes. It was an epic accomplishment and I have no doubt that we will return-to the moon and to many other worlds.

I'll wager an Andy Jackson ($20) that if a street corner poll was held in any college town in the US, the majority of responders could not tell you the date Americans landed on the moon, the name of the first US astronaut to set foot on the lunar surface, know the name of the LEM that carried them, tell you how many missions actually made landings or the US President who committed this nation to go to the moon before the end of the '60s.

As I kid, I followed the Apollo missions with excitement and fascination, beginning with Apollo 8. The missions to the moon inspired me to want to study math and science, to want to grow up to be like all those clever people that created all that incredible technology.

I became an engineer and it has been a very rewarding career for many years now, beginning with my very first project at my first engineering job, which involved developing new technology for a NASA communications satellite.

In those early years of my career, some of the old timers who had worked on hardware for the Apollo missions were still around, and it was quite a thrill to meet those guys and hear the stories about the Apollo days. I still marvel at what all those scientists and engineers were able to achieve, given the primitive computers and electronics capabilities of the 1960s, and that the average engineer did all his calculations with a slide rule, a pencil and a piece of paper.

When I saw this last night on Rachel Maddow's show, Ezra Klein's retelling of this story moved me to tears... We truly ARE a great nation at times -- if only we'd remember that....

"One small step for man..." and now we have returned to crawling for the past 40 years with the small exceptions of the Hubble and the shuttle.

No wonder this generation is addicted to video games and drugs. The awe of the real world has been displaced with small minded minions who would rather add up the cost of these things than see the real cost in not doing them.

Was that a typhoon over India?

They didn't say why the moon soil was orange. Maybe iron in the silica beads?

Apollo 17 marked the end of America as the world leader in science and technology. If Man survives another 1,000 years, this will be the day they remember as when we gave up our destiny on the High Frontier.

more than half of the current population of america were not alive when this happened is the part that tells the WHOLE story. Raise your hand if you think you know how to make gunpowder the way the settlers did and say what it is that dupont buried on both sides of the mason dixon and roughly how many years they did so in contemplation of a great conflaguration. Knowledge is power, yes, but, the will, the drive, the spirit, it was not so much the competition with the russians, sure, but our own propoganda had us believing they mostly did NOT have the right stuff. WE DON"T HAVE THE RIGHT STUFF NOW!!! No, it was the challange of doing what everyone had previously said could not be done...we were americans, we WANTED to know what and how the moon was made, it's composition, it's character, if our theories were right or wrong. WE THE PEOPLE, made that decision, one of a number of things that a strong majority of the people WANTED to do. We miss that today. Think of the ancient world wonders, the pride, the sense of accomplishment, the utter audacity of a focused human goal to make something,........wonderful.......something so big, so complex, so.........human. Yes, we have put that behind us for now. Our country is united, yes. In so many ways, BUT so very darned divided in so many other ways, so self indulged, indignant, selfish and intolerant as a whole that our own attitude has become a threat to our democracy in a way the forefathers shudderd at in their darkest and most solmnest of dreams. This attitude is found the world over, but here, it has changed our democracy. We all scamper about with complaints about everything from health care to global warming. Never before have so many spouted so much doom and gloom about so many LITTLE things, things they could not even change if they knew how, and, hyporcritically, they covet in their own private lives. The Robot rovers are smart move on our part, but it is patently obvious that our first foot hold in space is the moon, replete with all it's difficulties, it, the moon, remains OUR single best bet forward. Simply because of it's proximity. This attitude of gimmee, gimmee, gimmee, tax everyone else and make everything free is an attitude found in children, and precisely why we are so divided and incompetent in terms of carrying the torch forward. It's darned near impossible to point this out without involving the reds and the blues, but take this to heart, at least both are wrong...yea, MOST OF YOU BORN AFTER the A17 mission have no sense of what's truley real. If you did you'd be burying your own horse BS (on both sides), but take note, it takes a couple of years for it to turn into potassium nitrate, and noting dupont has it's mitts into a bigger conflaguration, can't see how close we are to another one here. I hope that with wisdom you all can see what it takes to steer away from diasaster. Forget climate change, you got a bigger problem, each other. You need to work, if you can't work for someone else, work for yourself. Put down the toys, those that came before you wanted you to have some free time but limit it. Think of others, realize that when people like dean call for full votes to equal half votes like Mi and Fla, he's so far outside the constitution that he should be thrown out of the country...and then DO THAT, throw that sort out. The constitution is but words on a piece of paper, but when put into action there is nothing that freedom and justice can't stop. Think. Access to health insurance is NOT access to health care. Why did so many people buy into such stupidity...cost?..then go right to the root of the problem, health care is too expensive...in the fifties this would of been clear, now, it's gimmee, gimmee, gimmee...and what let the rich pay for it? how far will that go? Not far. Think. We cannot recover the lead time the engineers of the fifty, sixties, seventies and even eighties gave us in space, but in this country, we can a hell of a lot, if we focus. If we work. If we believe. If we......TRY!!! Note carter above, like so many others has been typing over and over for more than a decade right here, we need an alternative launch system. I am certain he is aware of skylon....are you? WE put the politics in the space biz, we can take it out, start flipping off obamba and bahner and the rest till THEY get the idea!! Put the indignation where it belongs. If your for the space biz, great!! consider putting a small amount into stock for one of these ventures....Wish I could plug my own, but I won't. Let's leave it at this, we can do better than the apollos, we already did with the shuttles, but we can do better than that even. So let's DO IT!!!.......and if you even breath the words global warming, park your damned car and walk from here on out......let's show the world america has the right stuff, and it ain't horse chit.....

All you fools and ignorant people who don't know about the reality and truth of NASA should just go talk to Gus Grissom, Ed White, or Roger Chaffee.

They will explain to you idiots all that you need to know about the space program and all of the benefits it brought to YOU and your life.

I'm amazed that with this image, all these links, and all the comments, that no one has brought up how Un-Round that Marble is.

Just tilt your head 90° while looking at this picture!

This is of course because of the increasing tug on the earth's material, heading towards the equator, due to centrifical force and the increasing speed, which is at maximum at the equator [at least when the earth os not tilted in it's orbit].

I was 6 years old when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. I remember watching on TV with my Mom. My Dad was in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. That said, we stopped doing the good stuff like manned space exploration but we continue to waste money needlessly fighting all over the "big blue marble". It's something to think about. One more thing, all the kids my age figured we would all have jet packs to fly around by now! WTF happened??? ;-)