Sting, the familiar blonde Englishman crooner, once penned the following lyrics years ago, as a member of a popular new wave/rock/reggae/punk/world beat band The Police, a group that recorded albums with names like Zenyatta Mondatta and Reggatta de Blanc and Outlandos d’Amour:

Giant steps are what you take

Walking on the moon

I hope my legs don’t break

Walking on the moon

We could walk forever

Walking on the moon

And so on and so forth (it’s, naturally, from a song titled “Walking on the Moon”). It was written and released in 1979. Seven years earlier, American astronaut Eugene A. Cernan actually walked on the surface of the moon.

It was December 14, 1972. Exactly 43 years ago Monday.

A human being hasn’t set foot on the Earth’s only natural satellite since.

This is how Cernan signed off on the moon on that day, to Houston, before they got him back home:

07 00 00 47: “Bob, this is Gene, and I’m on the surface and as I take man’s last steps from the surface, back home, for some time to come, but we believe not too long into the future. I’d like to Just list what I believe history will record that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus Littrow, we leave as we come and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”

Hard to believe.

Why hasn’t America gone back? There were/are number of reasons. Funding. NASA. The Skylab program. The oil crisis in 1973, which helped hammer a key nail in the coffin of the Apollo program (which was already on its way out at the time).

But, with the promise of the privatization of space exploration (Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to name two) humans may finally, after almost half a century, make their return to the big hunk of cheese in the sky.

Or, it’ll be passed over completely for the bigger, badder voyage — to the red planet of Mars.

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