APOLLO 17 LUNAR MISSION 1972 " ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS " NASA DOCUMENTARY 17694
Video from the channel PeriscopeFilm about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 28:48. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.
What it shows
NASA film about Apollo 17 titled "On the Shoulders of Giants". The title comes from the phrase attributed to Isaac Newton that the narrator recalls at the start. It combines footage of the launch, the flight and the lunar surface with audio from the communications and narration. It begins with the countdown, which the sequencer automatically halted at 30 seconds before liftoff and which resumed once it was confirmed safe. It continues with the extraction of the lunar module Challenger by the command module America, arrival in lunar orbit on December 10 and the descent of Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt into the Taurus-Littrow valley on December 11. On the surface it shows them unloading the lunar rover and deploying the ALSEP experiment package. Cernan drills to extract core samples and implant probes, and the astronauts repair the rover's fender with a map, tape and clamps. They also place explosive charges to study the subsurface and visit Shorty crater, with its orange soil.
When and where it was filmed
The footage is from December 1972. It was filmed at the Kennedy Space Center, at mission control in Houston, in lunar orbit and on the surface of the Moon. It includes Ronald Evans leaving the command module on December 17, about 170,000 miles from Earth, to retrieve the film cartridges from the cameras and the sounder radar data. It ends with the return on December 19, with almost 250 pounds of samples on board.
Context
The film alternates the mission with the immediate future of crewed flight. A flight director describes the three crews planned for Skylab in 1973, with stays of 28 and 56 days. The Apollo-Soyuz test programme with the Soviet Union, planned for 1975, is presented, along with a mock-up of the space shuttle, designed to reuse its most expensive parts. It closes with the plaque left on Challenger's descent stage, which commemorates the first human exploration of the Moon.