Curated playlist
People who have walked on the Moon
- Pete ConradPete Conrad stepped off the Lunar Module's ladder on the 19th of November 1969, paused on the landing pad, and jumped down onto the Moon. His first words were not the solemn kind. "Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but…
- Gene CernanGene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface on the 14th of December 1972, climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module, and has not been followed by any human being since. More than half a century later, those footprints in the…
- Buzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on the 21st of July 1969 (UTC), nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong first touched the surface. His first words, spoken into the silence of the lunar landscape, were simply: "Beautiful view."…
- Alan ShepardAlan Bartlett Shepard Jr. awoke at 01:10 on the 5th of May 1961, ate a breakfast of orange juice, a filet mignon wrapped in bacon, and scrambled eggs, then climbed into a spacecraft perched atop a Redstone rocket. He had been strapped into…
- Neil ArmstrongNeil Armstrong set his left boot on the lunar surface at 02:56 UTC on the 21st of July 1969, and said seven words that an estimated 530 million people heard live: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Those 530…
- John Young (astronaut)John Watts Young flew in space six times, walked on the Moon, and commanded the first Space Shuttle mission. No other astronaut in history flew in four different classes of NASA spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command module, the Apollo…
- David ScottDavid Randolph Scott was born on the 6th of June 1932 at Randolph Field, near San Antonio, Texas. His middle name came directly from that base, a fitting detail for a man whose identity would be shaped at every turn by the places and…
- Alan BeanAlan LaVern Bean was born on the 15th of March, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle. He died on the 26th of May, 2018, at the age of 86. Between those two dates, he became only the fourth…
- Edgar MitchellEdgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and on his way home, something happened to him that no training could have prepared him for. Floating back toward Earth after Apollo 14, Mitchell experienced what he would later…
- Harrison SchmittHarrison Hagan Schmitt stepped off the Moon's surface in December 1972 and boarded the Lunar Module just before his commander, Gene Cernan. That sequence made Schmitt the next-to-last human being to leave the Moon. Cernan died in 2017,…
- James IrwinJames Benson Irwin told his mother, when he was about 12 years old, that he wanted to go to the Moon and might be the first person to do so. He was wrong about the first part. On the 30th of July 1971, Irwin became the eighth human being…
- Charles DukeCharles Duke was 36 years and 201 days old when he stepped onto the Moon on the 21st of April 1972, making him the youngest person ever to walk on another world. That record has never been broken. He arrived at a site called the Descartes…