Apollo 14 - Mission To Fra Mauro

Video from the channel James Sutherland about Apollo 14, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 28:22. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

NASA film that narrates the Apollo 14 mission (AS-509) from start to finish. It opens by recalling the Freedom 7 flight of 5 May 1961, with which Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and contrasts it with the Saturn V, with seven and a half million pounds of thrust, that launched Apollo 14 on 31 January 1971. Shepard commands the mission; Stuart Roosa stays in lunar orbit in the Kitty Hawk command module while Shepard and Edgar Mitchell descend in the Antares lunar module.

The film reviews the setbacks: the docking capture latches fail and the link-up is only achieved on the sixth attempt; before the descent a false abort signal appears, attributed to a loose particle on the button, which is resolved by reprogramming the lunar module computer from MIT and checking it in a simulator at Cape Kennedy; and the landing radar forces its circuit breaker to be reset. The Moon landing follows, then the first moonwalk (flag, MET cart, automatic scientific station with nuclear generator, seismometer, particle experiments, laser reflector and mortar, and Mitchell's "thumper"), and the second, the climb toward Cone crater, which stops less than 150 feet short of the rim for lack of time and oxygen. It closes with the liftoff, the reunion with Kitty Hawk, the return and the reentry on 9 February 1971.

It is period footage: images of the mission, of mission control and interviews with scientists, edited in 1971, before Apollo 15, whose lunar vehicle is presented as a future novelty. This copy comes from a digitized VHS tape.

Fra Mauro was the destination Apollo 13 failed to reach. Scientists hoped to find there material ejected by the impact that formed the Imbrium basin, coming from as deep as 60 miles. The two moonwalks total nine and a half hours, a record at the time, and the crew brings back 95 pounds of samples. The film highlights white rocks with potassium and uranium ten times more abundant than in the Apollo 11 and 12 samples.