Space Changes Nobody

A quick stack of four Apollo 17 70mm photos (AS17-147-22464 to AS17-147-22467, crops) captured by Gene Cernan inside the LM Challenger on December 11, 1972 showing the CSM America in the distance passing above the Taurus-Littrow landing site. pic.twitter.com/twPZpgrK6W

— Jason Major (@JPMajor) December 19, 2025

I did not remark yesterday on the end of our first lunar exploration in 1972 (although I did watch the bittersweet last episode of From the Earth to the Moon).  Anyway, here are some pithy thoughts from Apollo 12's commander about life after Apollo (from A Man on the Moon):

[Pete] Conrad stated one day, sitting in his office at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, California: “Don’t ever look back. I’m serious. What’s the point of looking back? I’ve already been there. How about some old guy sitting around telling you about how he played football for good ol’ Yale University and was the world’s greatest quarterback—that’s all the bastard ever talks about. Okay?” To Conrad, the scene he has just described is so awful that no further explanation is necessary. 

From time to time, however—usually for the benefit of an interviewer—Conrad does look back, and even among astronauts he is known as a great spinner of space yarns, or Lies and Sea Stories, as he calls them. But Conrad has kept the promise he made to himself on the day he was selected as an astronaut in 1962. Going to the moon, he says, hasn’t changed him. 

But that isn’t what people want to hear, says Conrad. “They’ve got some preconceived notion that I should tell ’em I was frightened, or I was awe-inspired, or I saw the Lord—or . . . I don’t know.” The truth sounds unbelievable: when he was on the moon his strongest feeling was that it was the right place to be at the time. “That just shuts the door.” So does the thought of a man who has been to the moon and who, today, does not look at it. “They know I’m lying. They say, ‘Don’t you go out and look at the moon?’ And I honestly don’t.”

... 

“Everybody thinks I got the Space Medal of Honor because I went to the moon. I say, ‘No, it was for Skylab.’ They say, ‘Oh, Skylab. Yes. What was Skylab?’ ” It’s the moon that people want to hear about, and like all his colleagues, when Conrad is introduced as one of the twenty-four men who went there, the question he is almost always asked is, What was it like? And he gives the neat, two-second answer he developed long ago: “Super! Really enjoyed it.” 

Yeah, I get it.  I mean, sure it was a big event, but as cool as it was, it was just one event of many in a person's lifetime and world history.  Still...

Selah.