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When did a human last walk on the Moon?

When did a human last walk on the Moon?
14 December 1972
Eugene Cernan, the last man to leave the surface, on Apollo 17

Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days on the surface and Cernan was last up the ladder. Twelve people have walked on the Moon and all twelve did so between July 1969 and December 1972 — a window of forty-one months. Everyone who has flown in space since has stayed in low Earth orbit, which is a few hundred kilometres up against the Moon's 384,000.

What
Eugene Cernan, the last man to leave the surface, on Apollo 17
When
14 December 1972
Category
Space
Could this change?
Yes. This streak could end, and if it does this page becomes a historical note rather than an answer.

Space

Question When
When did the Space Shuttle last fly? 21 July 2011
When was Halley's Comet last visible? 9 February 1986

This page gives a date and never a "years ago". These pages are built as static files, so a computed interval would freeze at build time and quietly become wrong — which on a reference site is worse than making the reader do the subtraction.

Common questions

When did a human last walk on the Moon?
14 December 1972 — Eugene Cernan, the last man to leave the surface, on Apollo 17.
What happened?
Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent three days on the surface and Cernan was last up the ladder. Twelve people have walked on the Moon and all twelve did so between July 1969 and December 1972 — a window of forty-one months. Everyone who has flown in space since has stayed in low Earth orbit, which is a few hundred kilometres up against the Moon's 384,000.
Could it happen again?
Yes. This is one of the entries where the streak could plausibly end, which is stated on the page rather than left implied.

Related pages

Sources

  1. NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Public domain (US Government))

How these figures are compiled and checked