Apollo 16: The Men, Moon, and Memories

Video from the channel Down The Rabbit Hole about Apollo 16, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 49:53. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary reconstructing the Apollo 16 mission, the fifth crewed arrival on the lunar surface, drawing on interviews with its three crew members, John Young, Charles Duke, and Ken Mattingly, and with mission control officials, interspersed with mission footage and communications recordings. It covers the forming of the crew, training, launch, the crisis before the landing, the moonwalks, and the return.

The story begins before Apollo 13: Mattingly, assigned to that crew, was pulled two days before launch after being exposed to the measles that Duke had caught, and was replaced by Jack Swigert. After the Apollo 13 accident, during which Young, Duke, and Mattingly worked from the ground to bring their crewmates home safely, the trio was named the prime crew for Apollo 16. Their goal was to land in the Descartes highlands, collect rocks, and deploy scientific experiments over three days on the surface. The documentary describes intense preparation: field geology training in the western United States and Hawaii, practice with the electric lunar rover, and about 2,000 hours in simulators and test facilities.

After the spacecraft separated in lunar orbit, Mattingly detected violent oscillations while testing the main engine's backup guidance system; for hours, aborting the landing was considered, until the fault was traced to a broken wire and the descent was approved. On the surface, Young and Duke installed a far-ultraviolet camera and spectrograph, described as the first telescope on the Moon, and a heat flow experiment that was disabled when Young accidentally pulled its cable. Across three moonwalks they gathered more than 200 pounds of samples, drove the lunar rover at about 11 miles per hour, and found that a rock that appeared nearby was actually as large as a house, hence the name House Rock. Duke left a photograph of his family on the ground. Mattingly, alone in orbit, carried out 15 experiments and, on the way home, a spacewalk of 1 hour 24 minutes to retrieve the film, during which his wedding ring, which he had lost, reappeared. The documentary closes with the later paths taken by the three men and their reflections on the future of space exploration.