Apollo 15 - In The Mountains Of The Moon (1971)

Video from the channel AIRBOYD about Apollo 15, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 28:34. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

This is the film "Apollo 15: In the Mountains of the Moon," which narrates the mission from the descent to the return. The lunar module Falcon, with David Scott and James Irwin aboard, flies over the lunar Apennines and lands on a plain beside Hadley Rille; Alfred Worden remains in orbit in the command module Endeavour. After the landing, the film goes back to the launch on July 26, 1971, at 9:34 a.m. Eastern Time, and covers the three surface excursions: the deployment of the lunar rover, which started without front-wheel steering and regained it the following day; the visits to Elbow and St. George craters; the science station with its heat-flow probes, which were hard to drill in, and the discovery on August 1, at the Apennine front, of the crystalline rock nicknamed Genesis Rock, stored in bag 196. On the third excursion they retrieve the drill core, look over the edge of the rille, Scott postmarks an envelope, and he drops a hammer and a falcon feather that hit the ground at the same time.

The film was produced in 1971 using footage from the mission itself: television from the rover's camera, operated from Houston, film shot on the surface and aboard, and shots from mission control. It includes the Falcon's liftoff seen from the rover, the docking, Worden's spacewalk 172,000 miles from Earth to retrieve 8,000 feet of film, and the splashdown on August 7, with one of the three parachutes collapsed.

The film underscores the scientific weight of Apollo 15: the first rover, a drill core 8.5 feet long with 58 layers, the mapping and analyses from the instrument module, the first subsatellite released from a crewed spacecraft, and observations of X-ray sources, coordinated with a Soviet observatory. It ends with the plaque bearing the names of 14 deceased astronauts and cosmonauts, and the Fallen Astronaut figurine that the crew left on the Moon.