This is the 35th in an exclusive series of 50 articles, one published each day until July 20, exploring the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Moon landing. You can check out 50 Days to the Moon here every day .

The race to the Moon in the 1960s led to all kinds of cultural inspirations, from Astronaut GI Joe to Norman Mailer’s famously idiosyncratic book about Apollo 11, Of a Fire On the Moon. Even Ayn Rand, the novelist and objectivist philosopher, wrote an analysis of the meaning of the Apollo Moon missions missions after attending the launch of Apollo 11 as a guest of NASA.

But perhaps the oddest Moon-related cultural experience was one that happened on the occasion of the launch of Apollo 17, in December 1972, the last Apollo mission to the Moon. It was a Caribbean cruise on Holland America’s ship, the S.S. Statendam, and anyone with the money for a ticket could mingle with NBC newsman Hugh Downs, science fiction legends Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova, novelist Katherine Anne Porter, and yes, Norman Mailer himself. This curious collection of luminaries also organized events and panels as part of the ship’s entertainment. The cruise lasted almost as long as the Apollo 17 mission itself: nine days, starting with a seaborne view of Apollo 17’s launch from seven miles off Cape Kennedy.

The cruise was called “The Voyage Beyond Apollo,” and as might be expected of a 1970s cultural experience, there is half of a carefully produced and edited documentary about it, from that era, available on YouTube. The event had the air of something that the novelist Tom Wolfe might have dreamed up.

During the spectacular nighttime launch of Apollo 17, for instance, with scientists and writers and ordinary passengers topside and awestruck by the power of the Saturn V launch, a South African poet named Berguet Roberts shouted out the lines of his poems about Moon missions while banging a tambourine. He was shouted down into silence by his fellow passengers.

The organizers managed to attract an all-star line-up in addition to Asimov, Mailer, and Bova. Science-fiction writers Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl were aboard, as was Theodore Sturgeon, who had written episodes of the 1960s TV series Star Trek.

The scientists included Cornell astrophysicist Carl Sagan, rocket pioneer Krafft Ehricke, and MIT professor and early AI scientist Marvin Minsky.