When did astronauts walk on the moon?

Twelve men have walked on the Moon, all of them between July 1969 and December 1972 and all of them flying in NASA's Apollo programme. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin opened the sequence: the lunar module Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity on 20 July 1969, and Armstrong stepped onto the surface at 02:56 UTC on 21 July. Apollo 12 followed in November 1969, landing within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 probe. Apollo 13 never reached the surface after an oxygen tank ruptured on the way out. Apollo 14 landed in February 1971, Apollo 15 in July 1971, Apollo 16 in April 1972 and Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed the era. Their third and final excursion ended on 14 December 1972, and Cernan, who climbed the ladder after Schmitt, remains the last person to have stood on another world. Schmitt, a geologist by training, is still the only professional scientist to have worked on the lunar surface. The three Apollo flights that were to follow had already been cancelled, with much of their hardware built.

Apollo was shaped by a political deadline rather than by any plan for routine operations, and the Saturn V production line closed with it. Going back means re-creating the whole chain: a heavy launcher, a deep-space capsule and a lander able to take a crew down and bring them up again. NASA's Artemis programme is assembling that combination now, with Orion carrying the crew to lunar orbit and a commercial lander for the descent. Until one of those landers flies with people aboard, the footprints left in December 1972 remain the most recent human traces anywhere beyond Earth.