Still are.
Bit of a discrepancy in the author’s comments, unless I misunderstood. Said he was born in 1971 but remembers his parents watching an Apollo lunar mission when he was very young. The last flight to the Moon was Apollo 17, in Dec 1972. Either he could remember things from a very young age or he is thinking of something else. Apollo-Soyuz maybe? That did not go to the Moon.