Apollo 16 (1972) - Nothing so Hidden, Full Length NASA Movie

Video from the channel Manic Movies about Apollo 16, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 26:59. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

This is a NASA film that reconstructs the Apollo 16 flight, the fifth crewed Moon landing. The narration is overlaid on the actual communications between the crew and mission control. The crew consists of John Young, commander and veteran of three previous spaceflights, Ken Mattingly, command module pilot, and Charles Duke, who joins Young on the surface. The story opens with breakfast on launch day, 16 April 1972. It continues with a gyroscope problem on the launch vehicle that nearly scrubbed the mission less than an hour before liftoff, and with the three-day journey to lunar orbit. After the spacecraft separated, Mattingly detected oscillations in the backup control system of the command module's main engine and postponed the circularization maneuver. For about six hours, teams in Houston, at MIT and at North American simulated the failure until concluding the engine could be used, and the descent was given the go-ahead.

The footage comes from the mission itself, in April 1972: the launch pad, mission control and the science support room in Houston, lunar orbit, and the Descartes plateau, where Young set foot on the surface on 21 April. The moonwalks with the lunar rover vehicle and the planting of the flag are shown. Also featured are the ultraviolet camera Young set up to observe Earth's upper atmosphere and galaxies, the accidental breaking of the heat flow experiment's cable, and the explosive charges used to probe the subsurface. The second moonwalk climbs the slope of Stone Mountain, a little over 4 km to the south, and the third reaches North Ray crater, about 5 km to the north, the largest lunar crater sampled up to that point. The film closes with the lunar module's liftoff, the docking, Mattingly's spacewalk on 25 April to retrieve the film cassettes, and the reentry on 27 April.

The title refers to a phrase of René Descartes, who gives his name to the landing site, written on a blackboard by a NASA geologist: nothing is so far away that it cannot be reached, nor so hidden that it cannot be discovered. The film also records the strongest magnetic field measured on the Moon up to that time. It further explains the decision not to repair the heat flow experiment, given the time and complexity that would have required.