Apollo 17 - The Last Men on the Moon | Part 1 | Free Documentary History

Video from the channel Free Documentary - History about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 52:09. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

First part of a documentary on Apollo 17, the program's last landing mission, edited using only NASA footage, mission audio and period interviews with the crew, without a narrator. It follows Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans from the preparations to the first excursions on the lunar surface.

The video opens with clips from earlier missions and Kennedy's speech setting the goal of landing a man on the Moon before the decade's end. The astronauts explain that Apollo 17 was a J mission, a continuation of Apollo 15 and 16: it carried more scientific payload and a lunar rover to range farther from the lunar module. Schmitt, a field geologist, argues for the value of sending specialists to the Moon. The Taurus-Littrow valley, on the edge of the Serenitatis basin, was chosen because it promised both some of the oldest and some of the youngest rocks on the Moon. According to Cernan, the night launch was not by choice: it was imposed by the position of the landing site.

The Saturn V lifts off at night from the Kennedy Space Center, lighting up the area almost like daylight. After trans-lunar injection, Evans, at the controls of the command module America, docks with the lunar module Challenger. Cernan and Schmitt land in a valley surrounded by mountains on three sides. During the first excursion they set up the ALSEP experiment package about 100 meters from the module and drill for the heat-flow experiment. When a fender on the lunar rover breaks, they first fix it with adhesive tape and then with maps held together with clips, following a procedure John Young had tested on the ground. Mission control tells them that first excursion lasted 7 hours and 12 minutes. On the second excursion they drive to station 2, more than 7 kilometers away, at the foot of the South Massif, and find orange-colored soil.