Abandoned Spaceships and Moon Buggies

For the first time since the 1970s, a NASA spacecraft will get clear pictures of Apollo relics on the Moon.

Inside the lunar lander Challenger, a radio loudspeaker crackled.

Houston: "We've got you on television now. We have a good picture."

Gene Cernan, Apollo 17 commander: "Glad to see old Rover's still working."

"Rover," the moon buggy, sat outside with no one in the driver's seat, its side-mounted TV camera fixed on Challenger. Back in Houston and around the world, millions watched. The date was Dec. 19, 1972, and history was about to be made.

Suddenly, soundlessly, Challenger split in two. The base of the ship, the part with the landing pads, stayed put. The top, the lunar module with Cernan and Jack Schmitt inside, blasted off in a spray of gold foil. It rose, turned, and headed off to rendezvous with the orbiter America, the craft that would take them home again.

The Apollo 17 moon buggy, circled, waits to film the departure of its mothership, Challenger.

Those were the last men on the Moon. After they were gone, the camera panned back and forth. There was no one there, nothing, only the rover, the lander and some equipment scattered around the dusty floor of the Taurus-Littrow valley. Eventually, Rover's battery died and the TV transmissions stopped.

That was our last good look at an Apollo landing site.

Many people find this surprising, even disconcerting. Conspiracy theorists have long insisted that NASA never went to the Moon. It was all a hoax, they say, a way to win the Space Race by trickery. The fact that Apollo landing sites have not been photographed in detail since the early 1970s encourages their claims.

Apollo landing sites

And why haven't we photographed them? There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?