It's nearly thirty years since Cernan uttered those words-a coda to Neil Armstrong's famous first step. Why have we stayed away from the Moon so long? The Apollo programme may be part of the explanation. A glorious but hugely expensive piece of political posturing, Apollo encouraged the view that lunar adventures are a waste of money that would be better spent on solving more mundane problems. Since then, the world's space agencies have shown little interest in the Moon The fleets of Soviet and American spacecraft dwindled in the early 1970s, and the missions that followed form a pretty sparse flotilla (see Graphic, following page). At the moment, with NASA's eyes on Mars and its feet bound by the over-budget International Space Station, our satellite might seem like a forgotten backwater.
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