From a story on futurity.org headlined “Why Go Back to the Moon?”:

As our nearest celestial neighbor, the moon has forever captured the awe of human beings. Some ancient cultures worshipped it as a deity or believed its eclipses to be omens. It was Galileo peering through an early telescope in 1609 who discovered the moon’s rocky surface, and NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969 that sent the first humans to walk upon it.

A half-century has now passed since humans last made direct contact with the moon, with Apollo 17 in 1972. But a new era of exploration has begun with zeal, as a number of space agencies and commercial ventures worldwide launch ambitious lunar projects.