List of People Who Have Walked on the Moon

Between July 1969 and December 1972, twelve people climbed down a ladder onto another world. Then the ladders stopped. More than half a century later the list is still twelve names long, every one of them an American man, and every one of them born between 1923 and 1935. You can fit it on an index card. This page tries to fit a little more.

There is a site that does nothing but tell you how many people are in space right now, and that number hasn’t touched zero since October 2000. The number of people on the Moon has been zero since 14 December 1972. The space station they live on circles about 400 kilometres up — close enough to walk through in Street View. The Moon is nearly a thousand times farther.

Each landing carried two people to the surface — the commander and the lunar module pilot — while a third stayed in orbit in the command module. The commander went out first. So the list runs in pairs, and each pair shares a date.

One detail trips people up: Armstrong’s first step came at 02:56 UTC on 21 July 1969. In Houston, and across the Americas, it was still the evening of the 20th. Both dates are right; it depends where you were standing on Earth.

Ten were military pilots. One was a civilian test pilot who had flown combat missions for the Navy. One was a geologist. Several held doctorates. All twelve had trained for years for walks that lasted, at most, about seven and a half hours at a time. Here is what each of them is remembered for, beyond the fact of having been there.

Alan Shepard was born before Mickey Mouse; Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt were born in the same year as Elvis Presley. Seen as lifelines, the Moon falls almost exactly in the middle of most of them — a single dot, then fifty years of being asked about it.

James Irwin was the first to die, in 1991, of a heart attack at 61. Since then the line has thinned out steadily. As of 2026, four are alive: Buzz Aldrin, David Scott, Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt. The youngest of them is 91.

Walking on the Moon and going to the Moon are two different lists. Twenty-four people flew there during Apollo; twelve of them stayed in the spacecraft the whole time. Some circled alone in the command module while their crewmates walked below. Some flew on missions that were never meant to land. And three of them were on Apollo 13, which was supposed to.

Two names cross both lists. John Young and Eugene Cernan flew to the Moon twice — first on Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal that went down to about 15 kilometres above the surface and turned back, then again on their own landings. Jim Lovell also went twice and never landed: Apollo 8 was an orbiting mission, and Apollo 13 lost an oxygen tank on the way. Lovell died in 2025.

In April 2026 the second list finally grew. Artemis II carried Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen around the far side and back, the first people beyond low Earth orbit in 53 years — and with them the list of people who have flown to the Moon now includes its first woman, its first Black astronaut and its first non-American. They did not land. The list on this page is still twelve.

NASA’s plan is to land the next crew near the lunar south pole, where shadowed craters may hold water ice, before the end of the decade. Whoever steps down first will be the thirteenth name here, and the first new one since 1972. It will probably not look like the drawings people made before Apollo — compare the 1963 Polish space stamps, which imagined the whole programme before a single landing — or the slow, careful physics of a film like Interstellar. But it will start the same way: a ladder, a footpad, a bootprint that, with no wind and no rain, could still be there in a million years.