Apollo 17 - The Last Men on the Moon | Free Documentary Space

Video from the channel Free Documentary - Space about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 52:04. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

First part of a documentary that reconstructs the Apollo 17 mission without a narrator: it edits together NASA footage, mission audio and period interviews with astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans. It covers the training, the night launch from the Kennedy Space Center, the journey to the Moon, the landing of the lunar module Challenger and the first excursions on the surface, ending with the liftoff from the Taurus-Littrow valley.

Apollo 17 was the Apollo program's last landing mission and the third in the J series, after Apollo 15 and 16, carrying more payload, a larger scientific package and a lunar rover to range farther from the module. Schmitt, a trained geologist, explains that his specialty lets him interpret the terrain on the fly. The landing site, a valley surrounded by mountains on the edge of the Serenitatis basin, was chosen because it promised both very old lunar crust rocks and possibly young dark volcanic deposits. Cernan clarifies that the night launch was not by choice: it was imposed by the position of the landing site.

The command module America, with Evans at the controls, docked with Challenger before Cernan and Schmitt moved into it and descended to the surface. Once on the Moon they deployed the flag and the ALSEP experiment package, and Cernan drilled two holes for the heat-flow experiment. A blow from the hammer tore off part of the rover's fender; the adhesive tape failed to hold because of the dust, and during the rest period John Young tested a solution on the ground: four maps taped together and held with the clips from the optical alignment telescope's lamp. The first excursion lasted 7 hours and 12 minutes. On the second, the crew drove to station 2, at the foot of the South Massif and more than 7 kilometers from the module, collected samples and found orange-colored soil.