The Last Human Footprint on the Moon Was Left in 1972. Today, NASA Revealed Who Makes the Next One.

The last human to walk on the Moon was a geologist named Harrison Schmitt.

It was December 14, 1972. He climbed the ladder of the lunar module, looked back at the footprints in the gray dust, and left. His commander Gene Cernan went up last — the final human to stand on another world. The engines fired. Apollo 17 climbed into the black sky above the Taurus-Littrow valley.

Nobody has been back since.

That's not a figure of speech. That's the literal reality. In the 53 years since Apollo 17 lifted off, zero humans have set foot on the Moon. We built the Space Shuttle. We built the International Space Station. We landed rovers on Mars. We sent a probe past Neptune. We photographed black holes.

We just never went back.

Today, NASA announced the crew of Artemis 3 — the mission that ends that gap.

This Isn't Apollo. It's Something Stranger.

Artemis 3 isn't going to the Sea of Tranquility. It's not heading for the flat, sun-washed basalt plains near the equator where Apollo missions landed — terrain that was chosen because it was safe, predictable, and easy to map from orbit.

It's going somewhere Apollo never could. The lunar South Pole.

The South Pole is a place of extremes. There are craters here so deep, so perfectly angled relative to the Sun, that their floors have not seen a single photon of sunlight in four billion years. The temperature inside them hovers around –200°C. Colder than the surface of Pluto.

And hiding in that perpetual darkness: water ice. Hundreds of millions — possibly billions — of tons of it.

The Mission Architecture Would Have Seemed Like Science Fiction in 1969

This is where Artemis 3 gets genuinely strange to think about.

Orion — NASA's deep-space capsule — launches on the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built. More thrust at liftoff than even the legendary Saturn V. In low Earth orbit, Orion doesn't just head for the Moon.

It meets the landers first.

Both Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX's Starship HLS are involved — two radically different spacecraft built by two fiercely competing private companies, cooperating on the same human spaceflight mission. The crew transfers. The descent begins.

Only 12 Humans Have Ever Done This

Let that number sit for a moment.

Twelve.

That is the complete list of human beings who have ever stood on another world. All of them American. All of them male. All of them fitting into a single 3-year window — 1969 to 1972 — before the program was cancelled.

One of the foundational goals of Artemis is to change both of those facts. Artemis 3 is designed to put the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface. The crew announced today carries that weight alongside everything else.

How We Got Here

Shackleton Crater: The Target

The landing zone sits near Shackleton Crater — a depression 21 kilometers wide and 4 kilometers deep, sitting almost exactly on the lunar South Pole. Its rim receives near-continuous sunlight (solar power). Its floor has been in total darkness for billions of years (water ice).

It is, arguably, the most scientifically valuable piece of real estate on the Moon.

You can watch the Artemis 3 orbital trajectory in real time as the mission approaches on SkyLens's live tracker. If you want to understand how orbital rendezvous actually works — why Orion meets the landers in low Earth orbit instead of lunar orbit — the learning section has a breakdown of orbital mechanics.

The Surface Mission Is Longer Than Any Apollo Stay

Apollo 17, the longest Moon landing in history, spent 75 hours on the surface. Artemis 3 is planning approximately a week. Astronauts will conduct multiple EVAs into the shadowed terrain, collect samples from regions that have never seen sunlight, and test life support and equipment that future long-duration missions will depend on.

This is a scouting mission. But it's the most important one humanity has mounted in 50 years.

We Chose Not to Go Back. Until Now.

Here's the thing nobody says out loud enough: after Apollo 17, we had the capability to keep going. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were already on the manifest. The Saturn Vs were built. The astronauts were trained.

Budget cuts cancelled them.

For 53 years, the Moon has sat exactly where it always was — 384,000 kilometers away, patient and indifferent. The water ice in those frozen craters has been there for four billion years. It wasn't going anywhere.

There are entire generations of astronauts who trained for the Moon, worked toward it, and retired without ever getting the chance. The people announced today carry something those astronauts never got: a ticket.

Read about more of what's happening in space right now on the SkyLens blog.