Return to the moon by U.S. is overdue

President Bush's plan to propose a permanent return to the moon cannot help but stir memories in an Apollo moonwalker — and raise new hopes for potential exploration. As the last of 12 men to step on the moon, and the only scientist to do so, my recollections are as clear today as 31 years ago.

It was December 1972. President Nixon had just been re-elected; the war in Vietnam was in its final years. We landed in a spectacular valley known as Taurus-Littrow on the southeastern edge of the Sea of Serenity. Apollo 17 was to be the last of the manned American moon missions for at least three decades, but we didn't know it then.

Taurus-Littrow as a name was not chosen with poetry in mind (Taurus was the mountain range above the valley, and Littrow was the crater nearby). The mind's poetry, however, is created not by names but by events — events surrounding not only three days in the lives of three astronauts but the close of an unparalleled decade in human history.

We first viewed the valley from orbit. During our week at the moon, we witnessed its face slowly change from the deep coldness of forbidding streaks of sunrise shadow and light, to the friendly morning contrasts needed for safe landings, and then to the harsh, featureless glare of a desert's noon. In their turn, the valley's meteor craters of Camelot and Cochise, the avalanche-covered Jefferson-Lincoln Ridge and the deep dust of Tortilla Flats reflected the sun's changing mood.

Our landing approach was sudden; we pitched forward. Triangular windows revealed the rocks and craters and looming mountain walls. A hurried glance to the right showed that friends on Earth did not fail as navigators, and the moon ship Challenger settled into the streaking dust rushing away from the soundless power of the rocket blazing beneath us. Racing against a relentless clock that determined our schedule, we hurried to step out into this now familiar, yet still untouched, new land.

With spacesuits on and checked, and the spacecraft hatch open to the airless reach of Taurus-Littrow, we slid down the ladder and finally touched, for ourselves and all who brought us there, the sparkling gray dust of eons. We were on the moon. The preparations for three days of exploration obscured the newness for a while longer. This spacecraft and friend of so many months of testing and training filled my thoughts and eyes. It was as if it knew that it would be left behind when we departed.

Then, for the first time, I was able to move away in long strides, like running on a giant trampoline. Finally our spider-like lunar module, Challenger, with its flashing, colored reflections, became a separate part of the total magnificent scene.