Looking through a window of the Apollo 16 command module, Charlie Duke was blown away by the sight that greeted him on April 19, 1972.
Three years earlier, while serving on the Apollo 11 moonshot team as capsule communicator, the voice of Nasa’s mission control in Houston, Texas, he had been teased fondly by colleagues after he briefly mistook imagery of the moon for Earth.
Now here he was, a quarter of a million miles from home, with the moon filling two-thirds of his window.
“This is really the moon,” Duke radioed to mission control, where a colleague jokingly urged him to double-check.
“It’s the most awe-inspiring sight I’ve ever seen in my life … just hung out there in the middle of blackness,” he said. “It’s really beautiful.”
At the age of 36, Duke — then a US Air Force officer and test pilot — was the tenth and youngest of 12 astronauts to walk on the moon during Nasa’s Apollo campaign.
Now aged 90, he is one of only four still alive to witness a new generation leading humanity back there under Nasa’s Artemis programme, which will ultimately establish a long-term human presence on the moon as a stepping-stone for the onward push to Mars.
Astronauts with Nasa’s Artemis II programme, from left to right: Victor Glover, pilot; Reid Wiseman, commander; Christina Hammock Koch, mission specialist; and Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP
Artemis II, the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 53 years, will launch sometime between February and April 2026 and last ten days.
“I wish I was with them,” Duke told The Times. “They’re going to have a thrilling ride … and the view, oh, the view!”
Apollo 16 was the fifth of six crewed expeditions that landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972. A seventh, Apollo 13, was crippled by an oxygen tank explosion and returned to Earth.
On Artemis II, Reid Wiseman, 50; Victor Glover, 49; Christina Koch, 46; and Jeremy Hansen, 49, will make a looping fly-past of the moon, venturing up to 4,700 miles (7,563km) beyond it, before gravity pulls their Orion capsule back towards Earth. Splashdown will be in the Pacific Ocean.
The purpose is to test the spacecraft and systems, such as life support, navigation and communication, to pave the way for future crewed landings.
It will be the furthest that humans have ever flown from Earth.
Charles “Charlie” Duke, 90
JAY REEVES/AP
Depending on when it launches and its trajectory, the crew on Artemis II may be able to see up to 60 per cent of the moon’s far side, which human eyes have never directly observed. From their vantage point in deep space, they will see the moon in the foreground and their home planet 250,000 miles or so behind it.
“They’re going to see a lot more than we did … the view they’re going to have of the whole Earth-Moon system in one view is going to be breathtaking,” Duke said.
He served as Apollo 16’s lunar module pilot, spending 71 hours on the surface with the mission commander, John Young, while Ken Mattingly — the command module pilot — remained in lunar orbit.
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While flying around the far side of the moon, they saw the Sea of Moscovy, a large plain on the lunar surface and the Tsiolkovsky crater — which Mattingly likened to a marshmallow floating in a cup of hot chocolate.
When they saw part of Earth rising above the moon, Duke exclaimed: “There it comes, there it comes, you guys!”
Mattingly described himself as “like a little kid with ice cream — I don’t know where to start.”
The late astronaut John Young salutes the US flag on the surface of the moon, 1972
CHARLES M DUKE JR/NASA/AP
The Artemis II crew will not land, nor enter lunar orbit or fly as low. But their views will also be ones for the history books.
“They’re going to look back at the whole moon and then beyond that to Earth … We saw just a very little sliver of the back side of the moon because our orbit was only about a couple of hundred miles above the surface … but they’re going to have this ability to see the whole of the back,” Duke explained.
“Also, the instrumentation that they have is just a lot more advanced than we had. I’m looking forward to some really exciting photographs and knowledge from Artemis.”
When Duke lifted off for the moon, it was in a capsule on top of a Saturn V rocket. Now stacked in the Kennedy Space Center’s vehicle assembly building at Cape Canaveral, Florida, is a successor — the Space Launch System (SLS), standing 322 ft tall, which will power Orion off the Earth.
Coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary year and its focus on innovation, the mission will stand as a “bold new symbol of the nation’s relentless drive to explore” and a celebration of “a country that has never stopped pushing the horizon forward,” Nasa said.
Duke said: “You go back through history and exploration has always been part of our inquisitive nature … Look at the early explorers who crossed the Atlantic Ocean; they took great risk but it was worth it and it’s the same way with space flight … people are willing to take the risk for the knowledge that we’ll gain.
“There’s a lot of reasons to go out and explore and to me that’s just man’s nature. What’s over that next ridge? What’s around the next corner?
“I’m excited that we’ve still got that exploratory nature.”
Kennedy Space Center’s vehicle assembly building
JOEL KOWSKY/NASA
The motivation is more than ideological. The Artemis programme will not only explore the moon but also act as a test-bed for the technologies required to head to Mars.
In-situ lunar resources such as the south pole’s reservoirs of ice will be essential not only for life support, but for manufacturing rocket fuel. In the more distant future, Helium 3, scarce on Earth but abundant on the moon, could be mined for fusion energy.
Duke applied to join Nasa’s space programme in 1965, four years after US President John F Kennedy had announced the goal of landing Americans on the moon, amid Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.
Today, the rival is China. Both the Trump administration and Biden’s before it have painted China as a rising threat to US space security.
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Under Artemis, America is taking an all hands on deck approach with international allies and the commercial sector, to maintain space supremacy. SpaceX and Blue Origin are building landers to ferry astronauts from lunar orbit to the lunar surface. Companies such as Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are providing lunar delivery services.
“We are in a great competition with a rival that has the will and means to challenge American exceptionalism across multiple domains, including in the high ground of space,” the head of Nasa, Jared Isaacman, told a congressional committee during his confirmation hearing.
“This is not the time for delay, but for action, because if we fall behind, if we make a mistake, we may never catch up, and the consequences could shift the balance of power here on Earth … Artemis is the key, I believe, to both beating China to the lunar surface and to maintaining a US presence at the moon.”
Duke sidesteps politics and controversy. President Trump’s proposed cuts to Nasa’s science budget, which threaten to decimate areas such as climate change research, are “something I don’t really worry about that much,” he says.
“I think Earth is in pretty good shape myself,” he adds.
On the geopolitical threat from China: “Back in the Apollo days, it was a race with the Soviets … We’ll see how it works out this time. But it’s a big moon, so there’s probably room for all of us.”