Dr Shane Bergin

And so it was a sign of strength.

But a lot of good science and engineering got done along the way.

It cost at one point 4.5% of America's GDP.

Which is absolutely incredible.

The biggest superpower in the world at the time and still putting all of that money and energy into getting there.

And there were a lot of unexpected consequences from that mission to the moon of the 70s, not least the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

So when we were so keen on getting to the moon, I think there was very little focus on looking back at where we'd come from.

And there was that famous Christmas Eve photograph of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon, so-called Earthrise photograph that was taken in 1968 and a flyby.

And it was said that that was the beginning of us looking at this kind of spaceship Earth, this fragile blue dot in the vast expanse of space and realising, gosh, for all our money, all our weapons, all our power,

We're very fragile and we need to look after ourselves.

We stopped.

Yeah, the last person to go to the moon was Gene Cernan in Apollo 17 in 1972.

I missed that film.

We never sent anyone back, but we're going back now and it's for the same sort of geopolitical reasons that caused us to go there in the 1960s.

Except, I say us, it was the Americans that went and

Nowadays, we have the Chinese with the Japanese, the Indians, even Europe has a stake here.

And we have just recently done a flyby with the Artemis 2 mission, which got a lot of excitement from various people.

But there is plans in the next two or three years for people to set foot on the moon.

Again, from a scientific point of view, there's probably very little reason to do it except to say that you can.

Of course, NASA are saying it's a launch pad to go to Mars.