Apollo 50-year anniversary: the moon landing’s legacy and the future of lunar exploration

In a brilliant white room at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, lies a clear plastic chest filled with bits of the heavens. Inside are meteorites recovered from Antarctic ice and grains of material believed to predate the formation of our solar system. These are treasures, helping us humans understand our place among the stars.

From the chest, geologist Kate Burgess pulls out another treasure: a tiny Teflon vial, double-wrapped in Teflon bags. It contains soil from the moon, collected by the astronauts of Apollo 17 in 1972.

The moon landing is one of the most famous events in human history. When it was broadcast on TV in July 1969 — July 20 in some parts of the world and July 21 in others — 500 million people around the globe watched it, and even more people have seen it since. The footage of Neil Armstrong taking those first steps 50 years ago is so famous that it must be hard to find anything new to say about it. Right?

Well, the new three-part PBS documentary Chasing the Moon does have some new information to share about the moon landing. The series goes all the way back to the roots of the American space program in the 1940s to trace the story of the space race chronologically, uncovering many fascinating lost nuggets and tidbits along the way. (You can watch it in full on PBS’s website.)

High on Mount Graham in Arizona, tucked into a forest of trees, there’s a telescope. It’s one of several at the Mount Graham International Observatory. But this one is especially concerned with the heavens; it’s operated by the Vatican Observatory.

Yes, the Roman Catholic Church has its own astronomical observatory. The Vatican’s astronomical institution dates back to at least 1891, and shows that the church is an active participant in the scientific world. Its observatory gave us the first photographic proof of the green flash at sunset. And researchers there are still digging into questions about nearby planets and asteroids, and galaxies far, far away.

Fifty years ago, human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. Some 650 million people around the world watched the historic landing on July 20, 1969, and heard astronaut Neil Armstrong say “... one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Fittingly, there’s a Google Doodle celebrating the anniversary this weekend. Even cooler: An image of the Saturn V rocket that propelled the astronauts to the moon is being projected onto the Washington Monument at night, culminating in a video projection on Friday and Saturday.

All the fuss is well deserved: The legacy of that mission — and all the Apollo missions — is immense.

The human body has evolved, for hundreds of thousands of years, to thrive on the surface of the Earth. But what happens when you take such an earthbound body and put it in the weightlessness of space?

Things get weird.

This week we will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the first time a human being has stepped foot on the surface of a celestial body that is not our own. No human has been back to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. It’s fair to wonder: When are we going back?

Well, there are some plans in place, with deadlines set sooner than you might expect.

The holy grail for collectors of space memorabilia is anything that was flown to the moon during the six Apollo missions and unloaded onto the celestial crust. It would be junk in any other context; vintage scientific equipment lucky enough to be projected at escape velocity to a barren destination 234,000 miles away. What makes those spare parts invaluable, explains Robert Pearlman, editor of the space-hobbyist consumer guide CollectSPACE (and an avid lunar antiquary himself), is when they’ve been stained by lunar dust — physical proof of a journey that still seems impossible.

”As you can imagine, the number of those items that are in private hands is very, very small,” he continues. “So part of the reason they’re valuable is simple supply-and-demand economics. But the other reason is that they represent the pinnacle of human achievement.”

It’s been nearly 50 years since the Apollo 11 moon landing. Neil Armstrong’s iconic footprint is still there, undisturbed; there’s no atmosphere, no wind on the moon to blow it away.

But the bigger human footprint on the moon is, arguably, the 96 bags of human waste left behind by the six Apollo missions that landed there.

In Watch This, Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff tells you what she’s watching on TV — and why you should watch it too. Read the archives here. This week: HBO’s 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, which will soon be re-available on HBO Go and HBO Now.

It’s easy to forget now that it’s a titan of entertainment, but HBO’s ascent was as disruptive in its day to broadcast television as Netflix’s has been now.

The first step on the path to recovery is admitting that the more you listen to moon landing conspiracy theories, the more you start to believe them.

What finally got me were the crosshairs. Crosshairs! The word itself sounds like it belongs on a bulletin board covered with a laserlike web of red yarn. But you tell me why some of the camera’s crosshairs appeared to be behind objects in NASA’s moon landing photos? You can’t!

Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on a journey to pull off humankind’s first moon landing. The mission was the culmination of years of research and preparation, and the pinnacle of the so-called “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, a years-long rivalry in which both sides competed for dominance in space exploration.

The eight-day journey was made possible by the careful deconstruction of the Saturn V rocket and Apollo spacecraft. At one point, the spacecraft even completely rearranged itself mid-flight.