Accelerate progress in our three core enterprises — Explore Worlds, Find Life, and Defend Earth. You can support the entire fund, or designate a core enterprise of your choice.
Toward the Next Generation The last Saturn 5, the largest rocket ever to leave Earth, lifted off December 7, 1972, carrying Apollo 17 and the last humans to walk on the Moon. Today dismembered museum relics are all that's left of these colossal rockets. If we are to send human explorers on ambitious missions again to the Moon or on to Mars, we will once more need heavy-lift launch vehicles. With Energia, the Soviet Union is now establishing heavy-lift capability. NASA