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Apollo 17: a bittersweet moment

Apollo 17's successful and spectacular lift-off last Thursday morning was a bittersweet as well as awesome moment, marking as it did the beginning of the end of our last manned lunar voyage of the decade—perhaps the last such effort for decades. To space scientists and others deeply involved in our space program, this final Apollo shot must be an utterly sad and frustrating affair. It seems akin to telling an electron microscopist or an astronomer or a research chemist—any true explorer—that he can take one more look, make one more probe, but then he'll have to put his sophisticated machine under wraps for a decade or two. Willfully turning off a national project of such magnitude, complexity, and import at a time when it has put us on the threshold of discovering new worlds which man has been contemplating and dreaming about for thousands of years seems misguided and wasteful. Granted, it's a "machine" ...