Prompt Cast
The Cancellation of Apollo 18, 19, and 20: What Could Have Been
TLDR After the successful Apollo 11 mission, the remaining Apollo missions, including Apollo 18, 19, and 20, were cancelled due to a decrease in interest and the prioritization of the Skylab program. These cancelled missions would have included landing inside a crater and conducting further exploration and research on the moon.
Timestamped Summary
00:00
Billions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands of people worked to land a human on the Moon, but after Apollo 11, the remaining Apollo missions were cancelled, including Apollo 18, 19, and 20.
02:29
President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing on the moon in 1961, and despite setbacks and the Apollo 1 disaster, the Apollo missions were rescheduled and incrementally tested before the first moon landing.
04:03
The Apollo missions were ordered by type, with each type being assigned a letter, starting with unmanned launches to test the viability of the Saturn V rocket, followed by unmanned test flights of the lunar module, then manned flights and live tests of the command and service module, and finally the first manned test of the lunar module in space, leading up to the first moon landing with Apollo 11.
05:41
The Apollo missions after the G mission were divided into H missions, which focused on precision moon landings, and J missions, which included upgraded lunar modules and lunar rovers for longer stays and exploration of interesting spots on the moon, but interest in further moon flights decreased dramatically after Apollo 11 and Congress made its first cut in the Apollo program in January 1970.
07:20
Apollo 20 was canceled to make way for the Skylab program, the first American space station, and as a result, Apollo 18 and 19 were also canceled, leading to a reshuffling of the remaining missions and their crews.
09:01
The canceled Apollo missions would have been the most interesting and scientifically significant, as they would have included landing inside a crater and conducting further exploration and research on the moon.
10:32
The last humans left the moon in 1972, but NASA is currently working on the Artemis project with the goal of landing someone on the moon by 2025.
