Apollo 15: "Never Been on a Ride like this Before"

Video from the channel NASA about Apollo 15, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 5:08. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A short NASA piece for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 15. It combines mission footage with a narrator reviewing its milestones: the lunar rover, the science on the surface and in orbit, and the return to Earth.

The mission launched on July 26, 1971. The commander was David Scott, the command module pilot Al Worden, and the lunar module pilot Jim Irwin. The narrator presents it as a big step forward from the previous three missions, with much greater scientific weight. The rover allowed the crew to cover more distance on the surface. The service module carried an instrument bay that Worden used to take photographs and data during his three days in orbit.

According to the video, the rover reached about 8 miles per hour. Scott and Irwin spent more than 18 hours on the Moon and brought back 170 pounds of material. They also set up the ALSEP experiment package and found the so-called Genesis Rock, more than 4 billion years old. Scott dropped two objects at the same time to demonstrate Galileo's theory, and left a small aluminum figurine in memory of 14 deceased astronauts from the American and Soviet programs. The rover's camera televised the ascent stage's liftoff for the first time, and a particles-and-fields satellite was released in orbit. On the way back, Worden made the first deep-space spacewalk, 197,000 miles from Earth, to retrieve the data cassettes. During reentry one of the parachutes failed and the capsule splashed down with two. Among the records, the video cites 107,000 pounds of payload in lunar orbit and 295 hours of mission duration.