Harrison Schmitt Hails Artemis II as Lunar Milestone

Albuquerque, New Mexico, marked a reflective moment for Harrison Schmitt, the last scientist to walk on the moon during Apollo 17 in 1972, as he expressed renewed excitement over NASA's Artemis II mission, a crewed lunar flyby that launched in September 2024. At 90 years old, Schmitt, a former U.S. senator from New Mexico and one of only four surviving Apollo moonwalkers, sees the flight as a pivotal step toward establishing a permanent human presence in space.

Schmitt, a field geologist by training, joined astronauts Eugene Cernan and Ronald Evans on Apollo 17, the final crewed lunar landing. Their mission focused on the Taurus-Littrow valley, a site deeper than the Grand Canyon, where they collected rock and soil samples to unravel the moon's origins and its ties to Earth and the solar system. "We were trying to put sort of the frosting on the cake of answering questions in a very complex geologic area," Schmitt recalled in an interview. The samples revealed the moon's 4.5-billion-year history, recording solar system evolution, including periods of heightened solar activity that may have warmed Earth's oceans and spurred life's diversification half a billion years ago.