🚀 Apollo 16 - Un Grand Prix sur la Lune (avec Charlie Duke)

Video from the channel Stardust - La Chaîne Air & Espace about Apollo 16, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 57:35. Language: French. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary produced for Apollo 16's fiftieth anniversary that reconstructs the mission from start to finish, from the forming of the crew to the later careers of its three astronauts, interspersing audio and footage from the mission itself.

After Apollo 15, with the hardware and procedures already proven, the last two missions were devoted entirely to science. John Young, a veteran of Gemini 3, Gemini 10 and Apollo 10, commanded the crew. Ken Mattingly, pulled from Apollo 13 after being exposed to the illness Charlie Duke caught, piloted the command module, and Duke the lunar module. The target was the rugged Descartes-Cayley region, whose rocks were thought to be very old. The launch, on 16 April 1972, was the program's last daytime one. The video devotes a segment to the pad's emergency evacuation systems: M113 armored vehicles, the rubber room and the slidewire.

On the way to the Moon, particles coming off the lunar module raised fears of a leak; they turned out to be flecks of paint. Once in lunar orbit, a fault in the SPS engine's backup system delayed the descent by several orbits, and an orange juice leak inside the suits affected the microphones. The lunar module landed next to a large crater. On the first excursion they deployed the ALSEP, though Young disabled the heat flow experiment by catching his foot in its cable, and Houston told them Congress had backed the space shuttle. They collected Big Muley, the largest rock of the mission, and Duke filmed the rover's "Grand Prix." The second excursion climbed Stone Mountain and visited the South Ray crater. The third went to North Ray, about 950 m in diameter, the largest crater visited in the program, with House Rock and a soil sample taken in permanent shadow beneath Shadow Rock. In total they spent 20 hours 14 minutes 55 seconds outside the module. On the way home a subsatellite was released and, during Mattingly's spacewalk, Duke recovered his lost wedding ring. They splashed down on 27 April 1972. Mattingly flew again on missions STS-4 and STS-51-C, and Young piloted the shuttle's first flight, STS-1; he died in 2018.