Despite being described as a “dress rehearsal” for the first moon landing, which took place just two months later, Apollo 10 achieved something incredible in its own right: the fastest speed that humans have ever traveled. Astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan reached a speed of 24,816 mph while returning from their eight-day voyage on May 26, 1969, a record that not even subsequent Apollo missions managed to top. Before doing so, Stafford and Cernan boarded the Apollo lunar module and orbited our only natural satellite at a distance of about 9 miles from its surface. Young later walked on the moon as part of the Apollo 16 mission, and Cernan did so with Apollo 17. |