APOLLO 14 MISSION TO FRA MAURO (1971) - NASA documentary

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

Remastered version of the NASA film about Apollo 14, the mission that in January and February 1971 took Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to Fra Mauro while Stuart Roosa orbited the Moon in the command module Kitty Hawk. It opens by recalling the 1961 Freedom 7 flight, with which Shepard became the first American in space, and the Saturn V launch on 31 January 1971. It then covers the six attempts needed to dock Kitty Hawk with the lunar module Antares, the false abort signal that was avoided by reprogramming the module's computer, and the landing radar dropout mid-descent. On the surface it shows the deployment of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, with its nuclear generator, the seismometer, the particle experiments, the laser retroreflector and the mortar package, plus the thumper device, the MET cart and the climb toward Cone crater. It closes with liftoff, the rendezvous in orbit, the weightlessness experiments and the reentry.

The footage comes from the mission itself and from NASA's centers in 1971: images taken on the Moon and from orbit, Mission Control in Houston and interviews with scientists. The channel uploads it restored at 24 frames per second in high definition, with noise reduction and color correction, without changing the original edit.

Apollo 14 returned to the site Apollo 13 never reached. Fra Mauro was thought to be made of material ejected by the impact that opened the Imbrium basin, so its rocks could be from the ancient lunar crust. The two moonwalks lasted 4 hours 50 minutes and 4 hours 35 minutes, a record of around nine and a half hours in total. The crew stopped less than 150 feet from the rim of Cone crater without knowing it, something discovered a week later through photo analysis. The mission returned with about 95 pounds of samples.