Apollo 17 Final Footprints on the Moon (1998) | Historic Space Flight Documentary

Video from the channel Down The Rabbit Hole about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 49:17. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

1998 documentary about Apollo 17, the last crewed mission of the Apollo program to the Moon, told by its three crew members — commander Gene Cernan, lunar module pilot Harrison Schmitt and command module pilot Ron Evans — together with NASA officials. It combines interviews with archive footage of the mission, from launch to splashdown.

The protagonists explain that, after the first Moon landings, political interest shifted to other matters such as the Vietnam War, and that the missions planned through Apollo 20 were cancelled even though the hardware existed to fly them. Schmitt, who had been slated for Apollo 18, was reassigned to Apollo 17 so that a scientist — specifically a geologist — would walk on the Moon before the program ended; another already-assigned astronaut had to be bumped. The chosen site was the Taurus-Littrow valley, considered a geologically very demanding location.

The night launch in December 1972 was halted at T-30 seconds by a wiring fault in the launch computer, which failed to send the command to pressurize an oxygen tank; the mission lifted off about two hours and forty minutes later. After two Earth orbits, the third stage, the S-IVB, boosted the spacecraft toward the Moon. The lunar module Challenger landed in the valley, where the crew deployed the ALSEP experiment package, with problems affecting the long-period gravimeter. At Station 4 they discovered orange soil of volcanic origin, and at Station 6 they studied a large boulder linked to the formation of the Serenitatis basin. Cernan broke a fender on the lunar rover, which was replaced with one improvised from maps and clamps. Before leaving, they read the plaque fixed to one of the module's legs. On the way home, Evans performed a spacewalk to retrieve the film from the cameras in the SIM bay. The mission brought back about 250 pounds of samples. The documentary closes by reviewing what became of each crew member afterward.