On this day in space! Dec. 7, 1972: NASA launches Apollo 17, last crewed moon mission

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On Dec. 7, 1972, NASA launched the last crew to land on the moon with the Apollo 17 mission.

On Dec. 7, 1972, NASA launched the last crew to land on the moon with the Apollo 17 mission.

Apollo 17, the final crewed moon landing mission to date, lifts off on NASA's first night launch with astronauts from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 7, 1972. (Image credit: NASA)

Like most of the other Apollo missions, they lifted off from Kennedy Space Center's historic launchpad 39A on a gigantic Saturn V rocket.

This was the last time a Saturn V rocket would launch astronauts into space, and it was the only nighttime launch of the Apollo program. The crew spent three days at the moon before heading home, and no one has been to the moon ever since.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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