The Cancellation of Apollo Missions after Apollo 11
TLDR After the successful Apollo 11 mission, the remaining Apollo missions were cancelled due to various reasons, including the Apollo 1 disaster, the need for Saturn V rockets for the Skylab program, and the reshuffling of missions and crews. Lunar exploration did not resume until NASA's current Artemis project.
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.
02:04
After the Apollo 1 disaster, all of the Apollo flights were rescheduled and ordered by type, with the A missions being the first unmanned launches of the Saturn V rocket in November 1967.
03:48
The Apollo missions after the first moon landing were divided into two groups: the H missions, which were designed to practice precision moon landings, and the J missions, which were reserved for lunar survey missions that never happened.
05:38
Apollo 20 was canceled in favor of the Skylab program because they needed a Saturn V to launch the space station, and all of the Saturn Vs were accounted for.
07:24
Apollo 18 and 19 were canceled, leading to a reshuffling of the remaining missions and their crews, but the astronauts who were scheduled for the canceled missions eventually went into space on other Apollo missions, Skylab, or the space shuttle.
09:05
The Apollo program ended in 1972, and despite expectations of a return to the moon, lunar exploration did not resume until NASA's current Artemis project, which aims to land someone on the moon by 2025.
10:50
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