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Having settled into a new, lower orbit just 31 miles above the lunar surface, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently passed over the Apollo 17 site.

Harrison "Jack" Schmitt on the moon, December 1972, with Earth in the background.

We emailed moonwalker Harrison Schmitt, the Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and the only geologist—the only scientist—to have walked on the moon, and asked him if he’d seen the new photos of his old stomping grounds. He had. Anything strike him as different from the way it looked in December 1972?

“The most surprising geological aspect of the image is the very dark area that begins about 100 meters north of the SEP [the Surface Electrical Properties transmitter] site,” he replied. “This is probably a concentration of black pyroclastic beads (also seen at Shorty Crater) in the regolith. If we had been able to see it before the Apollo 17 mission, we probably would have picked a station there for a stop on the way to Station 6 (the large boulder site at the base of the North Massif).”

When asked if there’s anything he’d like to see in more detail on future LRO passes, Schmitt had a ready answer. “I suspect that they plan eventually to image the entire area; but a comparable image of Shorty Crater where we found the orange pyroclasitc glass [here's a description of the site and here's a lab photo of the glass beads and an accompanying description] and of the boulder tracks on the walls of the valley would be of great interest. This resolution and sun angle may make it possible to map the distribution of pyroclastic glass throughout the area and region.”

What else did he think was noteworthy? “The very dark rectangle a the LRV [Lunar Roving Vehicle] final parking spot is puzzling,” he said. “Something drastically changed the albedo of the upper surface of the LRV, probably the result of changes to the materials of the seats or because of deposits from broken silver-zinc batteries. Similary, the area immediately arouund the Challenger descent  stage appears darkened, also probably because of contamination from the materials or fluids in the stage.

“Our EVA 1-3 LRV tracks away from the landing area are not obvious,” he continued, “but I suspect other versions of the image will show them. That will be more difficult because the landing area had been lightened by the winnowing of fine material from the top of the regolith giving a very thin albedo enhancement. Tracks in this area look dark because of stirring up the normal dark regolith from below this enhancement.

“Just seeing this overhead, high sun angle detail of the Apollo 17 landing site in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow strikes my interest!” Schmitt wrote. “The pre-Apollo 17 photography we had for planning was at lower sun angles and at least ten times lower resolution. Having a record of our activities in the vicinity of the Challenger [lunar module] stirs great memories. My appreciation and awe goes to Mark Robinson and his LRO team.”

Over the next year or so, NASA’s  LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) will be systematically photographing  the Apollo landing sites from orbit. Here’s the most recent view, showing the Apollo 12 landing site where Pete Conrad and Alan Bean came down in Nobember 1969, near the same spot where the Surveyor 3 spacecraft had landed two years earlier (click on the photo to see it larger).

Visible in the LRO scene are the descent stage, or bottom half, of the Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid, and the smaller Surveyor spacecraft. (The photo at right shows how the area looked to Conrad and Bean.) In the new orbital photo you can see the dark tracks made by the astronauts as they roamed the area, and the ALSEP experiment package they left behind.

Rather, the end of it. The crew of Apollo 11 didn’t realize how magnificent it was until they were thrust into a frenzied world after 19 days of quiet quarantine. From the moment they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, they’d been penned up like three men in an episode of The Twilight Zone, having returned to their own people to find themselves captive curiosities, like fish in an aquarium or animals in a zoo.

The Apollo 11 crewmembers are greeted by their wives as they arrive in Houston.

Following a flight from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to Houston, their trailer was hooked up to Building 37 at the Manned Spacecraft Center (today the Johnson Space Center), where their quarantine continued in more spacious digs. The building housed the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, which included an apartment complex with private rooms for each man, common rooms, workrooms, a kitchen and dining room, and labs for studying the lunar material they’d brought back.

That post-flight period, during which NASA had the opportunity to fully debrief the crew (through panes of glass), was the last bit of peace and quiet the astronauts would enjoy for a very long time. Armstrong celebrated his 39th birthday during the quarantine, and was pleasantly surprised with a cake from the in-house chef, who shared their quarters along with another chef, a couple of doctors, a janitor, a journalist, and a NASA public relations official. Potential contamination with an adjacent lab where the study of moon rocks was in progress pulled six more people into the quarantine.

Then, on August 10, 1969, at about 9:00 on a Sunday evening, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins became free men, deemed at long last not to be health risks to planet Earth due to some unknown lunar germ they possibly had picked up on the moon. They were free to go home. Including their eight-day, 500,000-mile roundtrip flight, and their medical quarantine prior to that, they had been in seclusion for over a month.

Armstrong celebrates his 39th birthday with a surprise cake during the quarantine, August 5, 1969.

Their freedom would be short-lived, with Monday their only day off at home. Tuesday saw a major press conference at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, and Wednesday morning at 5:00 a.m. the beginning of a one-day, cross-country megatour for which Richard Nixon loaned them his presidential jet. Tickertape parades greeted them in New York and Chicago, and the day climaxed with a huge banquet at Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Hotel, attended by 1,440 guests including 50 astronauts, all of NASA’s top brass, 44 state governors, representatives of 92 foreign countries, entertainment industry heavies, Supreme Court justices, and the president and vice president and their families. The $43,000 gala’s menu included garden peas shelled by hand to prevent bruising, and a Claire de Lune ice cream dessert, each staked with an American flag.

Armstrong comes out of quarantine on August 10. Chief astronaut Deke Slayton is seen at left.

Not to be excluded, Houston threw its big bash for the crew three days later, attended by 250,000. September 6 brought individual parades for each crewmember in his own hometown. September 9, they were brought to Washington for NASA’s Apollo 11 “Splashdown Party” at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, and an unveiling of the commemorative moon landing stamp at the U.S. Post Office. A week later the crew was summoned back to Washington to be honored at a joint session of Congress.

On September 29, the round-the-world “Giant Step” goodwill tour began, in which about 100 million people in 24 countries on six continents saw the astronauts, and an estimated 25,000 people shook their hands. The trip, again on the presidential jet, finished on November 5 with an overnight for the crew and their wives at the White House, complete with a private dinner with the president.

Aldrin fingers a shotgun—not the one Soviet cosmonauts would give to Armstrong—in Norway.

The whirlwind didn’t end there. Armstrong was off to Vietnam for Christmas with Bob Hope’s USO tour, as the requests for appearances and speaking engagements began to pour in.

But a trip he made the following May was perhaps the most intriguing: An invite to the Soviet Union, in which Armstrong—the second NASA astronaut to visit after Frank Borman—was received quietly in St. Petersburg. His visit had not been announced. He made a presentation to the International Committee on Space Research, and some days later visited Moscow and Star City. He met personally with Premier Alexei Kosygin. His personal hosts were cosmonauts Georgy Beregovoy and Konstantin Feoktistov, of Soyuz III and Voskhod I, respectively. After meeting the widows of Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov, and being led around Star City by Valentina Tereshkova, Armstrong was feted at a dinner attended only by the male cosmonauts, in which they presented him with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun, his name engraved on the stock.

Apollo 11’s PR race seemed to have no finish line. But the other race was over, and the Soviets, good sports in the end, had done their part to recognize the triumph of Apollo 11. Although Armstrong had to turn over most of the official gifts he received to the U.S. government, he was allowed to keep the shotgun.

In an essay published recently in the New York Times, novelist Thomas Mallon made a provocative comment: “If any real scandal attaches to Project Apollo, it’s the extent to which hard science was allowed to dominate the astronauts’ hours on the moon. With less geology and more ontology, they might have kept the public fired up for further space exploration.”

It sounds harsh, even anti-science (heresy!), but I understand what Mallon means. Most of the men who went to the moon now say they regret not having had more time to savor the experience. They rushed around like rock-collecting robots, ever mindful of the checklist and the voice of Mission Control, and had to steal whatever time they could to pause, look around, and react like human beings to the alien world on which they’d landed. What a shame, for them and for us.

Journalist-turned-filmmaker Al Reinert must have felt the same regret when he set out to make his Oscar-nominated 1989 documentary For All Mankind—which still stands as the best film ever done on Apollo. Reinert almost singlehandedly changed the tone of Apollo reminiscences from grand-scale techno-worship to a focus on the individuals who journeyed to the moon. Instead of learning how many pounds of rocks he collected, we hear Charlie Duke recount a weird and vivid dream about finding his own body and that of fellow Apollo 16 astronaut John Young on the moon. Instead of triumphal music, we get Brian Eno’s eerie, ambient soundtrack. It’s Apollo as a personal story, scaled down but every bit as powerful as the bombastic narratives about national glory and heroism we’d been served before Reinert came along.

For All Mankind was re-released this summer on DVD and Blu-ray, with extras including An Accidental Gift, a mini-feature on the making of the film, in which Reinert claims that the film shot by the Apollo astronauts—not the geological samples—was the real treasure returned from the moon. Here’s a clip:

NASA is once again thinking of sending people to the moon, “this time to stay,” as the rallying cry goes. And once again, scientists are planning a busy schedule of fieldwork. Which is fine. For all the talk of expanding human civilization to the moon and Mars, nobody suggests what individual people might do there, other than tending science experiments or some grim corporate mining operation. But if we do return, this time could we please give the astronauts an occasional break to think/ write / sing / play/ take pictures/ meditate or do whatever else it is that human beings like to do, left to their own devices?

All over: A dusty Gene Cernan inside the lunar module Challenger after his third Apollo 17 moonwalk—one of the last photos taken on the moon.

Space historian Matthew Hersch writes:

This year marks the 40th anniversary not only of Apollo 11’s historic moon landing, but of the vigorous public debate that accompanied it—debate that, decades later, shows no signs of weakening. Human spaceflight has always been controversial, and condemnation of Project Apollo began almost immediately following President Kennedy’s announcement of the moon goal in 1961. Scientists and lay persons alike wondered whether the returns on the endeavor might ever equal its costs, or if it would, instead, be (in the words of one critic) “the most expensive funeral man has ever had.”

Of all the criticisms, only the technical ones seemed to diminish over time. In the fall of 1968, American journalists still weren’t sure if the United States could make it to the moon before the Soviets did. But within months, NASA proved that its astronauts could achieve lunar orbit (Apollo 8), dock with and pilot a lunar lander (Apollo 9) and take the lander to within 50,000 feet of the moon’s surface (Apollo 10). Whether America should go to the moon was another matter, and the diverse objections commentators raised have kept social critics and comedians busy ever since.

By 1969, NASA’s funding had already begun to decline; distress over the expenditure of resources was the most common complaint about Apollo from the Left and the Right: the program soaked up funds that many thought could be better spent on social welfare, defense, or nothing at all. Other criticisms were ideological: some felt that Apollo represented the worst of American culture instead of the best—a government project in the land of free enterprise; an example of American hubris, militarism, racism, and gender inequality; a garish form of public theater. Even the Soviet Union (itself the sponsor of a vigorous moon program) criticized Apollo, describing it as a grotesque farce the decadent West had orchestrated to lull its citizens into a false state of satisfaction—mindless capitalist “entertainment,” according to the government-controlled Soviet press. Other critics noted the uncertain pedigree of some of the foreign-born NASA engineers (Tom Lehrer’s “Wernher von Braun”), or condemned the loss of life in the January 1967 Apollo 1 accident.

The Apollo 11 landing tempered the objections, but only for a while. Ten days after the newspapers reported the triumph, moon news had been driven from the front page in favor of the usual topics of interest: Nixon, Vietnam, the Middle East. Landing on the moon hadn’t changed the world, at least not in a way that anyone would notice; the lunar surface had become just one more place—like the South Pole—that a few talented people might visit from time to time. The only thing likely to have preserved Apollo 11’s triumph from the critics (short of finding large lunar gold deposits) was continued interplanetary exploration; without it, Apollo became part of the past instead of the future.

With each successive anniversary of Apollo 11, pride mixed with ever greater quantities of nostalgia, fueled by scholarship casting new light on the moon decision. For each work of solid scholarship (like Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age) there were hundreds of editorials, opinion articles, and funny but flippant riffs on a national preoccupation that seemed very serious at the time, but increasingly strikes modern audiences as absurd (Gerard DeGroot’s Dark Side of the Moon; Jon Stewart on The Daily Show). The arguments, like Apollo itself, are frozen time: that establishing NASA was a mistake; that NASA should have gone to the moon in partnership with the Soviets or not at all; that it should have stopped at the first landing, or flown people better able to interpret or take advantage of the trip (scientists, philosophers, artists). Other critics have balked at America’s loss of nerve, wondering why it failed to capitalize on its moon success with further explorations of the solar system. Conjuring the unsavory image of Holocaust deniers, some would even rob Apollo of its history, insisting that the landings were faked on a soundstage. Efforts to debunk the debunkers have spawned a sub-literature (Moon Base Clavius) that is in equal measures fascinating and sad.

Long after Apollo’s technical achievements are dwarfed by other adventures, its greatest legacy may be the volume of comment it generated. As a free society, the United States tolerated public criticism of the space program in a way other nations would never have allowed. The criticism almost certainly made Apollo a better program: stronger, more focused, and imbued with urgency. Were they to visit our world in a time machine, the emperors of ancient civilizations would easily understand why America went to the moon in 1969. What might make them wonder is why the nation tolerated such criticism, or how it could pull off the landings in spite of it.

Hersch, an HSS/NASA Fellow in the History of Space Science at the University of Pennsylvania, is writing a labor history of American astronauts.