![]() They had found remnants of volcanic glass. Analysis back on Earth proved the mission a success. But halfway through their second excursion, Schmitt became ecstatic when he spotted something unusual: orange soil. The pair’s first extravehicular activity-as astronauts call such trips outside their spacecraft-turned up mostly breccias, conglomerate rocks created by the meteorite impacts that actually formed most lunar mountains. Satellite imagery had suggested these lunar highlands might be volcanic in nature. In December 1972, Cernan and Schmitt landed in a valley of the Taurus mountain range in the Sea of Serenity. The two astronauts used the jagged Bonito lava flow, along with surrounding cinder fields and cones, to test equipment and practice geological survey techniques. The mission for this final lunar landing was to find evidence of volcanism on the moon. In the early 1970s, commander Gene Cernan and geologist Jack Schmitt trained here before Apollo 17. Just up the road from the Cinder Hills is Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, another astronaut training site. ![]() Have your own extravehicular activity at Arizona’s Bonito lava flow Here are seven adventures to get you started. If you count yourself a casual enthusiast, having your own space-related fun down here might be an exciting way to connect more deeply with the events unfolding up there. Public-private partnerships will carry humans back to the moon, onward to Mars and hopefully beyond. We’ve finally arrived at the dawn of a second space race. These places, captured in my new book Space Age Adventures: Over 100 Terrestrial Sites and Out of this World Stories, include astronaut training sites, artifact-filled museums, mountaintop observatories, working spaceports and NASA centers. Already I’d stopped by many space-related sites over the years, but how many more were out there? After a multiyear mission with plenty of research and travel, I was pleasantly surprised, finding more than 100 spots across the U.S. Stumbling across the Cinder Hills astronaut training site just when new NASA missions and SpaceX rockets were starting to launch stoked my interest in rediscovering the space age. But from dark-sky campsites across the country, I kept looking up at night, wondering when that next step beyond low Earth orbit might happen. I became a raft guide and travel writer focused on Earthly adventures. The plodding pace of real-life human space exploration caused my enthusiasm to wane. Yet, like a lot of enthusiasts, I found the 1990s and 2000s to be hard times. I devoured issues of Air & Space magazine, space books and science fiction shows. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by space exploration. ![]() They were recreating a portion of the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, the smooth terrain where Apollo 11 would land in 1969. As it turns out, the Cinder Hills were bombarded in the 1960s-not by natural forces but by some adventurous specialists from the United States Geological Survey and NASA. I was searching for a quick campsite and found one amid the strangest of worlds: Cinder Hills Off Highway Vehicle Area in northern Arizona.įilled with cinder cones and craters, the area looked like it had been hit by both a volcanic eruption and a meteor strike. On a warm June evening several years ago, after 17 days rowing whitewater through the Grand Canyon, I was too tired to drive back to my summer base near Moab.
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