The landing sites that were planned for the lost Apollo missions are still waiting for the footsteps of human beings, //

However, three more missions to the moon - Apollos 18, 19 and 20 - could have been flown, but instead were canceled. All of the hardware for these missions had already been built, and trained astronauts were ready to fly. The savings of those cancellations amounted to only a few tens of millions of dollars.

An article in Seeker suggests that what was lost by this must be one of the most outrageous, bureaucratic decisions in space history.

"If the Apollo 18-20 flights were realized, school kids today could be looking at stunning photographs taken from the mountain-rimmed floors of the young impact craters Copernicus or Tycho, or the terrain on the far side of the moon, or the frozen volcanic lava flows from billions of years ago."

success of the Apollo missions to the moon would have inspired the United States to mount more voyages of discovery, not to be so anxious to bring the program to a close that it would cancel missions for which hardware had already been built.

However, the stress of the Vietnam War, racial tensions, and the efforts of some unscrupulous politicians to paint the space program as a drain of money that would better be spent on social programs contributed to Apollo's early close.