The Last Moon Mission | Apollo 17: The Untold Story of the Last Men on the Moon | Full Documentary

Video from the channel Science Tech TV about Apollo 17, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 55:25. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A documentary about Apollo 17, the last crewed mission to the Moon, combining NASA footage, mission audio and interviews with geologist and astronaut Harrison Schmitt and with scientists and engineers who worked on the Apollo program. It follows the mission from crew selection to splashdown in the Pacific and assesses its scientific legacy.

The Apollo program was born from President Kennedy's commitment in May 1961, shortly after Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight. After the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, public and political interest declined and the missions planned after Apollo 17 were cancelled. The crew consisted of commander Eugene Cernan, a veteran of Gemini and Apollo 10; Ronald Evans, command module pilot on his only spaceflight; and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who replaced Joe Engle under pressure from the scientific community and was the only geologist to walk on the Moon.

The launch, on 7 December 1972, was the only night launch of a Saturn V. During the outbound journey the crew took the famous photograph of Earth known as the Blue Marble. The lunar module Challenger landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley, chosen for its geological variety: north and south massifs, rockfalls from the slopes, the Lee-Lincoln scarp and a landslide of material from the highlands. The astronauts deployed the ALSEP experiment package, with four instruments never before used on the Moon, and drove around the valley in the lunar rover, whose broken fender they repaired with adhesive tape and a map following a procedure devised from Houston. At Shorty crater, Schmitt found orange soil formed by tiny volcanic glass beads. In total they logged 22 hours of exploration, covered 34 km, and collected more than 110 kg of samples and over 2,400 photographs. Evans mapped the surface from the command module America and performed a spacewalk on the way back to retrieve film from the external cameras.