lunar-reconaissance
Explanation
The Joke
A NASA mission control scene shows someone announcing that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has locked on to the Apollo 17 landing site. They explain that now they can see where the last men on the Moon walked, where Gene Cernan put "a few more dots in the regolith," and that nobody would ever see this place again. The description becomes increasingly poetic and melancholic: "Mankind's unknown gigantic place, wandered through..."
The punchline comes when someone in the control room says "I put on the live feed" -- revealing that the dramatic, reverent monologue was being broadcast publicly, presumably making the speaker look overly sentimental or melodramatic in front of a live audience.
The Humor
The comic plays on the genuine awe and poignancy of revisiting humanity's last footsteps on the Moon -- a place no human has returned to since Apollo 17 in 1972. The speaker gets increasingly carried away with the emotional weight of the moment, waxing poetic about humanity's abandoned lunar legacy. The punchline deflates this by revealing it was all being broadcast live, turning what was meant to be a private moment of scientific reverence into a public embarrassment. It satirizes the tension between the profound significance of space exploration and the banal reality of modern media, where every moment is immediately shared and stripped of its intimacy.
References
The comic references the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a real NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 that has indeed photographed the Apollo landing sites from orbit. Apollo 17 (December 1972) was the last crewed Moon mission, with Gene Cernan being the last person to walk on the lunar surface. The LRO has taken actual photographs of the Apollo 17 landing site showing the tracks left by the astronauts and their rover.