Longest time on the lunar surface

What to remember

On 11 December 1972, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission landed on the Moon. They stayed on the surface for 74 hours 59 minutes and 40 seconds, a little over 3 days, the longest stay ever on the lunar surface.

The figure reads best against the backdrop of the Space Race. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union and the United States competed to be first: Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in orbit, in 1957; Yuri Gagarin's flight, the first person in space, in 1961; then Neil Armstrong's first steps with Apollo 11 in 1969.

Spaceflight records split into crewed and uncrewed categories. This one sits firmly in the first: it measures neither speed nor altitude, but the time two astronauts spent on the ground of another world.