Apollo 17 - Full Mission (Day 1)

Video from the channel lunarmodule5 about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 6:17:08. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

A near-real-time reconstruction of Apollo 17's first day, built from period audio and footage: commentary from Kennedy Launch Control and mission control, and communications with the crew. It begins at T-1 hour 22 minutes in the countdown and runs until commander Gene Cernan falls asleep, about 9 hours 48 minutes after liftoff. Command module pilot Ron Evans and Jack Schmitt appear, along with the command ship America and the lunar module Challenger, bound for Taurus-Littrow.

The footage comes from the pad at Kennedy Space Center and from the control rooms during the Saturn V's night launch and the first hours of flight. The countdown covers the cabin purge, the xenon-lamp floodlighting of the pad, the escape tower and the deluge system, and records a visit by Vice President Spiro Agnew. At T-30 seconds an automatic cutoff halted the count: the terminal sequencer had not commanded pressurization of the third stage's liquid oxygen tank. After testing the fix on a mockup at the Marshall Space Flight Center, the tank was pressurized manually and jumpers were installed; liftoff came about 2 hours 40 minutes late and lit up the center as if it were daytime.

The third stage, the S-IVB, left the spacecraft in an orbit of about 90 × 93 nautical miles, and the translunar injection was moved earlier so the arrival at the Moon would keep to schedule. Over the course of the day there are spurious master alarms tied to panel 2, a fault reading on the docking latches (three were not locked and were reset by hand), and bright fragments shedding from the third stage. Evans docked America with Challenger and extracted the lunar module; the S-IVB then maneuvered to impact the Moon and be recorded by Apollo 14's seismometers. Schmitt describes a nearly full Earth, with Africa, Antarctica and cyclones visible, and Gene Kranz's team hands off the shift to Pete Frank's. The first midcourse correction is canceled and the crew sets up passive thermal control before going to sleep.