Apollo 17: last man on the moon

The final Apollo lunar mission was delayed at the last minute for some makeshift repairs to their lunar rover vehicle. The crew were Gene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt. Schmitt was a geologist who had qualified as a LEM pilot. Lindsay:

Scheduled for a 9:53 pm liftoff, Apollo 17 had the only last minute hold of the Apollo launches. As the last moments approached the astronauts steeled themselves for the thrill and excitement of lift‑off and heard the count drop to “Thirty…” and stop. The count had stopped at thirty seconds to go! Cernan’s fingers tightened on the abort lever – just in case. In the firing room a red light flared indicating the pressurization for one of the propellants in the Saturn‑IVB hadn’t registered because a ground computer failed to send a command to the third stage oxygen tank due to a faulty diode. When the manual override also failed the launch team began a frantic procedure to bypass the fault before time ran out. Countless prayers were answered when the count resumed within the launch window.

Finally Launch Control called:

“Two… one… zero… we have a lift‑off and it’s lighting the area. It’s just like daylight here at the Kennedy Space Center as the Saturn V is moving off the pad. It has just cleared the tower.”

After the 86‑hour routine flight they attained lunar orbit. On 11 December they landed on the surface. Schmitt recalled:

“Gene landed the LM as if it were an everyday event.”

Four hours later Schmitt reached the end of his EVA checklist, then announced, “The next thing it says is that Gene gets out!”

Cernan asked Schmitt, “How are my legs? Am I getting out?” Schmitt replied, “Well, I don’t know. I can’t see your legs. I think you’re getting out though, because there isn’t as much of you in here as there used to be.”

Cernan felt a great satisfaction and sense of achievement to be able to plant a Cernan bootprint on the lunar surface and looking around at the looming mountains, giant boulders, landslides and craters found to his pleasure they had landed beside the crater he had named after his daughter and reported, “I think I may just be in front of Punk.” Cernan noticed the soil glittered with what looked like millions of tiny diamonds, but the magic evaporated when Schmitt joined him and reported he was seeing specks of glass. “The soil looks like a vesicular, very light‑coloured porphyry of some kind; it’s about ten or fifteen percent vesicles.”

The now familiar routine of exploring around the Lunar Module in the rover was interrupted by Cernan breaking part of the wheel fender off with his rock hammer sticking out of the pocket of his suit. “Yeah, I caught it under my hammer. The reason it was so important to fix it was because of the lunar dust. It’s fine like graphite, but rather than a lubricant, it’s a friction producing material – it gets into everything, into your visor, into the electronic gear, and when we drove the rover without that portion of that fender we had a rooster‑tail of dust thrown completely over the top – over everything, and that was just unacceptable. So we made a fender out of some geology maps. We took duct tape, but we couldn’t use it because of all that lunar dust, we couldn’t clean it off enough for the tape to stick. So we taped a couple of maps together the night before and then had to use light clamps from inside the LM to clamp it on to the existing portion of the fender. When we came home we needed the clamps because they held both lights, so we brought the fender home and it’s now in the Smithsonian in Washington.”

The lunar soil looked orange. Lindsay:

Schmitt’s boot had kicked the ground and revealed soil ranging from bright orange to ruby red, which at the time was hoped to be more recent volcanic activity but turned out to be microscopic glass beads, tinted by titanium, about the same age as the rest of the rocks around. It had been ejected by an impact, not by volcanism.

At 13° Apollo 17 had the highest Sun angle of all the missions.

Cernan said:

When you are on the surface of the Moon in the daytime it’s a paradox. You are standing on the surface of the Moon lit by sunlight – you, your body and the surroundings, and you look up at the sky and it’s black – it’s not darkness – it’s just black. Most people confuse darkness with blackness – they are two totally different worlds. Darkness is the absence of light in my definition. Blackness is a void. Blackness is the absence of almost anything. If you look at the Earth from the Moon it reflects sunlight, yet it is surrounded by the blackest black you could ever conceive in your mind – the absence of anything. The blackness has three dimensions. I didn’t find the black sky above oppressive. I define blackness as the infinity of time and space and if you let your mind and imagination wander the infinity of time and space does anything but close in upon you. When you stand on the Moon and look up and see that blackness which goes all the way to the horizon of the Moon, it doesn’t feel like you are being closed in upon like a black painted ceiling at all – as a matter of fact it is exactly the opposite – you know it goes on forever.

When you are on the Moon you can’t look anywhere near the Sun – it’s devastatingly bright. When we drove the rover back to the east it was a lot more difficult to see up‑sun than down‑sun because of the reflective surface. The closer you looked toward the Sun you just couldn’t see much definition at all.

A lot of people say can you see anything else in the daytime on the Moon – can you see stars? The answer to that is yes – if you shield your face and eyes from all the reflected light around you can see stars in the daytime on the Moon – not as brightly as at night of course.

Lindsay:

A visit to the North Massif during the third geological excursion during day three and a visit to the Sculptured Hills and the Van Serg Grater brought to an end the last journey on the surface of the Moon in the twentieth century. By this time both Cernan and Schmitt were weary, aching, and rubbed raw trying to follow all the planned instructions and changes relayed up from the geological experts gathered at Mission Control in Houston.

Houston called to the moonwalkers, “Okay, you guys, say farewell to the Moon.”

Cernan replied, “Bob, this is Gene. I’m on the surface… as we leave the Moon at Taurus‑Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.

Gene Cernan turned to climb the ladder and spotted a plaque mounted there by a Grumman factory worker and repeated the inscription aloud, “Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.” He then climbed up the nine steps of the Lunar Module’s ladder to become the last person in the Apollo Program to leave the lunar surface. At the top he paused and looked around.

“I felt excited that we had been there, but disappointed that we had to leave. Jack Schmitt and I described that valley that we landed in as our own private little Camelot. We knew once we left we would never come back. It was our home – it was a uniquely historical place no man had ever been before in the history of life on this planet of ours. You were there – you made your imprint. You would think that would be enough, but there was so much to do. Then you do leave and you remember all the things you wished you would have done – little things or big things or whatever. It was hard to leave but it was time to leave. I always thought that if I knew things were going to go so well I wish I could have stayed another week or two. But you do know the longer you stay the more vulnerable you might become to problems that might come to keep you from getting home.”

On Earth Mission Control read a statement from President Nixon:

“As Challenger leaves the surface of the Moon we are conscious not of what we leave behind, but of what lies before us.” So, as the last words exchanged between the Moon and Earth echoed around the world, what were the people of Planet Earth who were listening thinking?

It seems everybody remembers the first step on the Moon, and of course that is what the people on Earth commemorate, but few can remember the last person to pull his boot off the surface of the Moon in the twentieth century.

At 4:54 pm on 14 December the last unofficial words spoken on the Moon’s surface were heard: “Okay, Jack, let’s get this muther outta here,” as Cernan flicked the yellow ignition switch and red flames ripped into the lunar surface. Shredded gold foil from the descent stage glinted in the boiling cloud of gray dust shooting out from under the engine bell housing. The Stars and Stripes whipped madly in the rocket’s exhaust, then relapsed into a permanent stillness as the rocket’s red glare dwindled into the distance above, and winked out. The dust drifted down to settle over the discarded twentieth century artefacts. The last of the aliens had gone.

Apollo 17 returned to Earth to splash down in the Pacific at 1:24 pm spacecraft time on 19 December. The crew of Apollo 17 were welcomed back with a big party on the carrier USS Ticonderoga , and entered the record books with the longest manned flight to the Moon, the heaviest swag of lunar samples, the longest activity time on the lunar surface with the greatest distance travelled, the longest time in lunar orbit, the greatest distance travelled and the only Saturn V night launch.