Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

Their hearts sank down to their boots – two and a half years of training and only 12.9 kilometres from their target and now it looked like they would have to abort and return back to Earth. The two spacecraft circled the Moon in company, anxiously waiting for an answer from Houston.

Duke recalls, “We knew in our minds it was very grim. It looked as if we had two chances to land – slim and none. We were dejected.”

“It was a cliff-hanger of a mission from where we were sittin’ in the cockpit,” Young said. “The secondary vector control system on the SPS motor wasn’t workin’ right and if they didn’t work right the mission rules said it was no go. The people on the ground did studies at MIT and Rockwell and in the end it worked out just fine.”

Houston advised them that it would be okay even if they had to use the back-up engine controls.

The mission was equipped with a lunar rover vehicle which set a lunar speed record of over 17 kph. Lindsay:

Back at the Lunar Module after the first excursion, Young put the rover through its paces in front of the movie camera. Duke described the scene: “He’s got about two wheels on the ground. It’s a big rooster tail out of all four wheels and as he turns, he skids the back end, breaks loose just like on snow. Come on back, John… I’ve never seen a driver like this. Hey, when he hits the craters it starts bouncing. That’s when he gets his rooster tail. He makes sharp turns. Hey, that was a good stop. Those wheels just locked.”

Young explains, “We drove it to see how it worked. We had to go up the side of a mountain with slopes more than 200, and I think we did that because we bottomed out the pitch meter. We wanted to see how the vehicle handled. We had the camera there to document it too, which nobody else had done before. It was like driving on ice when you cut the thing too sharp at about 5 or 7 kilometres per hour, it would slide out and go backwards. The stuff on the Moon is very slippery. You don’t hear anything but your suit pumps going when you’re drivin’ in a vacuum. It was very difficult to get in and out of – the Apollo 17 guys had a scoop to pick up rocks without even stopping the rover.”

The final Apollo lunar mission was delayed at the last minute for some makeshift repairs to their lunar rover vehicle. The crew were Gene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt. Schmitt was a geologist who had qualified as a LEM pilot. Lindsay:

Scheduled for a 9:53 pm liftoff, Apollo 17 had the only last minute hold of the Apollo launches. As the last moments approached the astronauts steeled themselves for the thrill and excitement of lift-off and heard the count drop to “Thirty…” and stop. The count had stopped at thirty seconds to go! Cernan’s fingers tightened on the abort lever – just in case. In the firing room a red light flared indicating the pressurization for one of the propellants in the Saturn-IVB hadn’t registered because a ground computer failed to send a command to the third stage oxygen tank due to a faulty diode. When the manual override also failed the launch team began a frantic procedure to bypass the fault before time ran out. Countless prayers were answered when the count resumed within the launch window.

Finally Launch Control called:

“Two… one… zero… we have a lift-off and it’s lighting the area. It’s just like daylight here at the Kennedy Space Center as the Saturn V is moving off the pad. It has just cleared the tower.”

After the 86-hour routine flight they attained lunar orbit. On 11 December they landed on the surface. Schmitt recalled:

“Gene landed the LM as if it were an everyday event.”

Four hours later Schmitt reached the end of his EVA checklist, then announced, “The next thing it says is that Gene gets out!”

Cernan asked Schmitt, “How are my legs? Am I getting out?” Schmitt replied, “Well, I don’t know. I can’t see your legs. I think you’re getting out though, because there isn’t as much of you in here as there used to be.”

Cernan felt a great satisfaction and sense of achievement to be able to plant a Cernan bootprint on the lunar surface and looking around at the looming mountains, giant boulders, landslides and craters found to his pleasure they had landed beside the crater he had named after his daughter and reported, “I think I may just be in front of Punk.” Cernan noticed the soil glittered with what looked like millions of tiny diamonds, but the magic evaporated when Schmitt joined him and reported he was seeing specks of glass. “The soil looks like a vesicular, very light-coloured porphyry of some kind; it’s about ten or fifteen percent vesicles.”

The now familiar routine of exploring around the Lunar Module in the rover was interrupted by Cernan breaking part of the wheel fender off with his rock hammer sticking out of the pocket of his suit. “Yeah, I caught it under my hammer. The reason it was so important to fix it was because of the lunar dust. It’s fine like graphite, but rather than a lubricant, it’s a friction producing material – it gets into everything, into your visor, into the electronic gear, and when we drove the rover without that portion of that fender we had a rooster-tail of dust thrown completely over the top – over everything, and that was just unacceptable. So we made a fender out of some geology maps. We took duct tape, but we couldn’t use it because of all that lunar dust, we couldn’t clean it off enough for the tape to stick. So we taped a couple of maps together the night before and then had to use light clamps from inside the LM to clamp it on to the existing portion of the fender. When we came home we needed the clamps because they held both lights, so we brought the fender home and it’s now in the Smithsonian in Washington.”

The lunar soil looked orange. Lindsay:

Schmitt’s boot had kicked the ground and revealed soil ranging from bright orange to ruby red, which at the time was hoped to be more recent volcanic activity but turned out to be microscopic glass beads, tinted by titanium, about the same age as the rest of the rocks around. It had been ejected by an impact, not by volcanism.

At 13° Apollo 17 had the highest Sun angle of all the missions.

Cernan said:

When you are on the surface of the Moon in the daytime it’s a paradox. You are standing on the surface of the Moon lit by sunlight – you, your body and the surroundings, and you look up at the sky and it’s black – it’s not darkness – it’s just black. Most people confuse darkness with blackness – they are two totally different worlds. Darkness is the absence of light in my definition. Blackness is a void. Blackness is the absence of almost anything. If you look at the Earth from the Moon it reflects sunlight, yet it is surrounded by the blackest black you could ever conceive in your mind – the absence of anything. The blackness has three dimensions. I didn’t find the black sky above oppressive. I define blackness as the infinity of time and space and if you let your mind and imagination wander the infinity of time and space does anything but close in upon you. When you stand on the Moon and look up and see that blackness which goes all the way to the horizon of the Moon, it doesn’t feel like you are being closed in upon like a black painted ceiling at all – as a matter of fact it is exactly the opposite – you know it goes on forever.

When you are on the Moon you can’t look anywhere near the Sun – it’s devastatingly bright. When we drove the rover back to the east it was a lot more difficult to see up-sun than down-sun because of the reflective surface. The closer you looked toward the Sun you just couldn’t see much definition at all.