Inside Apollo 17: Rare Footage From Last Moon Mission | Apollo Experience Ep 1

Video from the channel The American Story - US History Documentaries about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 52:17. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

First episode of a series reconstructing Apollo 17 using NASA material: pre-flight crew interviews, mission communications and narration from launch control and Apollo Control. It opens with a montage of moments from earlier Apollo missions and Kennedy's speech setting the goal of landing a man on the Moon and bringing him back before the decade is out. It then follows the flight from the night countdown to the end of the second moonwalk in the Taurus-Littrow valley.

Apollo 17 was the program's last Moon landing. Gene Cernan presents it as a J-series mission, a continuation of Apollo 15 and 16. It carried more payload, a heavier science package, more surface time and the lunar rover. Cernan explains that the night launch was not sought as a spectacle: it was dictated by the location of the landing site, in the northeast of the Moon. Jack Schmitt, a field geologist, presents his role as just another specialty, like the scientists planned for Skylab. The site, on the edge of the Serenitatis basin, was chosen because it could yield both some of the oldest rocks and some of the youngest volcanic rocks sampled up to that point. It also expanded the instrument network left by earlier missions.

The translunar injection burn was planned for 5 minutes 51 seconds. Ron Evans, at the controls of the command module America, docks with the lunar module Challenger. Before the descent, Cernan describes the site as a canyon surrounded by mountains on three sides, very demanding for the pilot. Once on the surface, the crew deploys the ALSEP, drills two holes about eight feet deep for the heat flow experiment, and collects samples. A fender on the rover breaks and the tape repair doesn't hold. For the second excursion, John Young tests on the ground a replacement made from maps taped together and held with the clips from the optical alignment telescope lamp. The first moonwalk lasts 7 hours 12 minutes. In the second, the astronauts travel more than seven kilometers to station 2, at the foot of the South Massif, where orange-colored soil appears.