Apollo, 1969–1972

The Apollo programme had one goal: to land people on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Six missions did it, between July 1969 and December 1972.¹

The road to the Moon

It began with a loss. On 27 January 1967, an accident on the launch pad killed the three astronauts of Apollo 1.¹ Crews flew again in October 1968, when Apollo 7 tested the command module in Earth orbit.¹

Two months later, Apollo 8 was the first Apollo flight to the Moon. Its crew orbited it and came home on 27 December 1968.¹ In May 1969, Apollo 10 went back to test the spacecraft in lunar orbit.¹

Each landing used two spacecraft. One astronaut stayed in orbit in the command module while the other two took the lunar module down to the surface. After exploring, setting up experiments and collecting rocks, they flew back up to rejoin him for the trip home.¹

Six landings

• Apollo 11 landed on 20 July 1969 in the Sea of Tranquillity, at a place now named Statio Tranquillitatis. Neil Armstrong was the first to step onto the surface, followed by Buzz Aldrin.¹²³
• Apollo 12 landed on 19 November 1969 in Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms.¹
• Apollo 14 landed on 5 February 1971 at Fra Mauro.¹
• Apollo 15 landed on 30 July 1971 near Rima Hadley, the Hadley Rille.¹
• Apollo 16 landed in April 1972 at Descartes.¹
• Apollo 17 landed on 11 December 1972 at Taurus-Littrow, and came home on 19 December. It was the programme’s last landing.¹

Apollo 15, 16 and 17 each left a rover on the Moon.⁴

Apollo 13

Apollo 13 left on 11 April 1970 for a third landing. A malfunction on the way forced the crew to give it up: they flew around the Moon and returned to Earth on 17 April.¹⁵

Twelve people on the Moon

In all, twelve astronauts walked on the Moon, two per landing: the commander and the lunar module pilot. The six others, one per mission, circled overhead.³

What they brought back

The six landings returned 382 kilograms of lunar rocks, cores, pebbles, sand and dust: about 2,200 separate samples from six different sites.⁶ They are kept at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and hundreds of samples still go out to researchers and teachers every year.⁶

They have told us when the Moon got its crust, some 4.4 billion years ago, and they record its bombardment and its lava flows. Their chemistry is compatible with the idea that the Moon formed from debris after a body the size of Mars struck the young Earth.⁶

The crews also left instruments on the surface: seismometers, heat-flow probes, laser reflectors, magnetometers and solar-wind experiments.¹

What is still there

Lunar module descent stages, rovers and experiments are still where the astronauts left them. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed them from orbit, and you can find each of them on our Maps page, linked from the mission pages.⁴