Why no one has landed on the Moon since 1972

What happened

A moon landing is a spacecraft setting down on the surface of the Moon, with or without a crew. Between July 1969 and December 1972 NASA's Apollo programme landed six crews, and twelve people walked on the Moon, starting with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969.

The last was Apollo 17, launched on 7 December 1972 with Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans. It landed in the Taurus-Littrow Valley and splashed down on 19 December. NASA calls Schmitt the first scientist to walk on the Moon, and Cernan, who spent more than 73 hours on its surface, the last person to leave his footprints there.

The six missions brought back 382 kilograms of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust; three automated Soviet spacecraft returned another 300 grams. Every moon landing since has been robotic. One recent example: in February 2024 Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander touched down in the Moon's south pole region, which NASA called the first commercial uncrewed landing on the Moon.

The official explanation

The first answer to why no one has gone back is that Apollo was cut short. NASA's lunar mission archive records that three more landings were originally scheduled and all were cancelled because of budget constraints: Apollo 20 in January 1970, and two more flights that September.

The deeper reason was a choice about where to spend. The 2009 report of the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee, published by NASA, says President Richard Nixon "did much to scale it back", responding to a perceived decline in public support for far-reaching exploration and to the economic decline of the time. Offered options that included a return to the Moon, he confined crewed flights to low Earth orbit, with the Space Shuttle, announced in 1972, as the keystone.

The money never came back. The same report charted NASA's share of the federal budget falling from 4.5 percent at the peak of Apollo to about 0.5 percent by 2009, and noted that since 1972 no human had travelled more than 386 miles from the surface of the Earth.

Later attempts stalled. President George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration of 2004 aimed to return humans to the lunar surface by 2020. The 2009 review found that the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule being built under the Constellation programme had slipped "as a result of technical and budgetary issues", and NASA's Office of Inspector General records that Constellation, established in 2006, was cancelled in 2010.

The current effort is Artemis. In March 2019 NASA committed to a south pole landing by 2024 instead of 2028, a date that did not hold. Artemis II flew a crew around the Moon in April 2026. NASA's Artemis III page, last updated in June 2026, describes a 2027 mission in low Earth orbit to test rendezvous and docking with commercial landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX, and NASA plans Artemis IV, in 2028, as the first crewed mission to the lunar south pole.

What witnesses said

The astronauts' own words are part of the record. As he left the surface in December 1972, Cernan said: "We leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." Fifty years later NASA's chief historian, Brian Odom, noted that the agency's human spaceflight programme had spent the intervening half-century in low Earth orbit.

For anyone asking whether the moon landings were real, the strongest evidence is physical, and much of it has been checked outside NASA. Apollo 11 left a laser reflector on the surface. On 1 August 1969, less than two weeks after the landing, the first accurate laser ranges to the Moon were made at Lick Observatory, and a second station at McDonald Observatory began ranging a month later. From the mid-1980s a French station at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur became the world's leading lunar ranging site.

Where scientists stand

For scientists the landings are a working fact, because the hardware is still measurable. A 2008 paper in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific described the Apache Point Observatory Lunar Laser-ranging Operation in southern New Mexico, which had reached one-millimetre precision in measuring the distance to the Moon and in one eight-minute session recorded about 2,500 returning photons from the reflector array left by Apollo 15.

In 2008 Japan's space agency, JAXA, reported that the Terrain Camera on its Kaguya orbiter had detected the "halo" of brightened ground left by the engine exhaust of Apollo 15's lunar module near Hadley Rille, and called it the world's first such detection since the Apollo programme ended. NASA's curation laboratory still distributes nearly 400 lunar samples a year for research and teaching.

What independent reviewers argue about is the return, and their diagnosis is money. The 2009 committee, whose ten members included scientists, engineers and astronauts, said the human spaceflight programme appeared to be "on an unsustainable trajectory", with goals that did not match its resources, and that meaningful exploration beyond low Earth orbit needed about $3 billion a year more than planned. In 2021 NASA's Inspector General projected $93 billion in Artemis spending from 2012 to 2025 and a cost of $4.1 billion per launch of the SLS rocket and Orion capsule for the first four missions, most of it expendable, single-use hardware. By comparison, it noted, Apollo's lunar lander took about six years from contract award to launch, with substantially more funding once inflation is counted.

Questions people ask

Verdict

The moon landings are confirmed: six landings, twelve moonwalkers, 382 kilograms of samples, and hardware detected from observatories on Earth and from a Japanese orbiter. Why haven't we gone back to the Moon? Because after Apollo the United States chose low Earth orbit, and the programmes meant to return ran into budget and schedule problems. As of September 2026 that is changing slowly. Artemis II carried NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen around the Moon, reaching 252,756 miles from Earth, beyond the distance record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970, before splashing down off San Diego on 10 April 2026. The next landing is planned for 2028. Real or Legend files the landings as confirmed.