Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images Apollo landing sites

I missed this when it appeared a few days ago, but it's a good day to post it: LRO has imaged five of the six Apollo landing sites at a resolution of a few meters per pixel.

The largest human-made object in each of these pictures is the lunar module's octagonal descent stage, which was left behind when the ascent stage took off to take the astronauts back to lunar orbit on the first leg of their trip home. The best picture (because of a favorable sun angle) is actually of the Apollo 14 site, where you can see suggestions of the lunar module's landing legs (or their shadows), and the tracks made by the astronauts (and their handcart?) as they walked between the sites of the lander and the ALSEP science package.

I'd hoped to see the rover tracks from the last three missions' sites, but they're not visible; LRO may get them later in pictures taken from final mapping orbit.

Apollo and later

My parents tell me I was watching on TV when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon. I have to take their word for it, since I was barely one year old and have no memories of the event.

I do remember bits and pieces of some of the later missions. I have really distinct memories of watching TV at our place in Ohio and seeing a Saturn V taking off, and my father explaining how the stages of the rocket would fall off as it got higher. I was concerned about what was going to happen to the people riding in the lower stages. Dad said there weren't any, but I insisted that some of the markings on the side of the rocket were windows. Then I made a crayon drawing of a rocket with USA written on it separating into pieces.

I also remember seeing some Walter Cronkite-narrated footage of an Apollo command module bobbing in the ocean, with those big strange-looking flotation balloons on top. Cronkite is tied up in all of these memories, as well as in everything else I remember of world events of the early 1970s.

The really vivid July 20th space memory I have is (as I've said many times before) of the Viking 1 landing on Mars exactly seven years later, during CBS's East Coast airing of Captain Kangaroo. I was a huge space buff by then and it fired my imagination tremendously.


As James Nicoll says here, the history of American space exploration after Apollo (sometimes in collaboration with other countries) has been pretty remarkable—it just bears little resemblance to old science fiction or old futurism, and hasn't involved massive human movement into space. The main thing we've learned from human spaceflight efforts in the past 40-odd years is that working in space, while possible, is a lot harder than optimists thought it was in the Collier's days.


NASA's post-Shuttle plans involve a push to go back to the Moon (and, theoretically, on to Mars), in spacecraft that in some ways resemble an enlarged Apollo. Charlie Stross has said he doubts it'll come off. The program is probably technically feasible, but we don't have anything like Apollo's psychological-warfare motivation to keep it going. Apollo was unusual in that it was a human-spaceflight program that actually did have an enormous scientific haul, but it was so expensive that it never would have happened if it were motivated by the science alone, or by the manifest-destiny dreams of space fans.