Apollo 17

Apollo 17 left for the Moon just after midnight, 46 years ago. It was the only night launch and it was the last manned flight out of Earth orbit and to the Moon.

Any hope of continuing died when Nixon was elected. He was as implacably and irrationally hostile to anything championed by John F Kennedy as Trump has been vs Obama.

The Saturn production line was shut down and the expertise lost. Half of the struggle of trying to build a new heavy-lit rocket is that the capability to make really big fucking rocket engines has been lost. So we're sort of stuck with ganging together a lot of smaller engines, as the Soviets did, or strapping large solid-rocket boosters to the central booster body.

If we had kept going with the Saturn and developing from there, we would be in a much different place than we are with having been limited to low Earth orbit for the last forty years.

Burn and rot in Hell, Richard Nixon.