v1.0.2 / chapter 23 of 24 / 01 may 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* After the near-disaster of Apollo 13, further Apollo missions were performed without incident, though the program was on the way out by that time. The Soviet manned Moon program was fizzling out at the time as well, without having had any public successes, though their unmanned Moon program achieved some significant "firsts".
* As the US achieved repeated successes, and an unplanned cliffhanger adventure, in manned Moon exploration, the USSR's effort continued to run out of steam:
The flight took place roughly in parallel with the Apollo 11 Moon landing, raising worries of a possible collision between the American and Soviet spacecraft. This was a bit implausible, like thinking two gnats flying through a stadium might bang into each other, but Frank Borman still called the office of Mstislav Keldysh to confirm there was no risk.
The Soviets, following the public line that the USSR never had a manned Moon program, would claim that their Moon effort was strictly based on the robot Luna probes, and in fact the Luna program resulted in both the first automated sample-return probes and mobile rover missions. These were both major accomplishments and in fact, in some ways were more the way of the future than the Apollo program. However, they weren't manned Moon missions and they received little public attention.
* Following the successful mission of Soyuz 3 in October 1968, the USSR felt confident enough to conduct a series of manned Soyuz flights. On 14 January 1969, they launched "Soyuz 4", carrying Vladimir Shatalov, into orbit, and then launched "Soyuz 5" the next day, 15 January, with a crew of three, including Boris Volynov, Alexey Yelisayev, and Yevgeni Khrunov.
The two spacecraft docked in space, with the Soviets announcing that it was the world's first experimental space station. This was an exaggeration, but it was the first rendezvous and docking of two manned spacecraft, ahead of the rendezvous and docking of Apollo 9's Spider CSM and Gumdrop LEM in March. To emphasize the point, Khrunov and Yelisayev put on spacesuits and transferred from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4. Soyuz 4 returned to Earth on the 17th, followed by Soyuz 5 on the 18th.
Although the mission achieved its goals, apparently technical problems had occurred that had to be resolved before further flights. The next Soyuz missions didn't take place until the fall of 1969, when the Soviets put three of them into orbit at the same time:
Puzzlingly, although the three spacecraft maneuvered to a rendezvous, there were no dockings on the triple mission. As was revealed after the fall of the USSR, Soyuz 6 was supposed to have photographed the docking between Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 8, but the rendezvous electronics on all three spacecraft failed, apparently because a new preflight test procedure disabled all three in exactly the same way. The three spacecraft did perform a number of experiments, and it was certainly an impressive and exhausting feat of logistics to fly three missions at once. Soyuz 6 came back home on 16 October, followed by Soyuz 7 on 17 October and Soyuz 8 on 18 October.
At the time of the triple flight, Mstislav Keldysh announced the USSR was not working on a manned Moon mission, and in fact for a long time the Soviets maintained they had never even had a manned Moon program. Keldysh said that the Soviet manned space program would focus on flying a space station.
* Although the subject of space stations will be discussed in detail in a separate document, the early days of US and Soviet space station activities overlap the Apollo program timeline and so need to be outlined here.
The Soviets became interested in a military reconnaissance space station roughly in parallel with the US MOL effort. Korolyev had promoted his Soyuz 7K-R space station, which was something like a Soyuz 7K-OK orbiter with a stretched orbital module but no return module. It would be launched unmanned and serviced by a Soyuz 7K-OK or something very similar. However, Chelomei won out with a bigger, more ambitious design, named "Almaz (Diamond)". Since the Soviet Union had a tradition of leveraging military and civil space efforts off each other, it made sense to them to develop a civil version of Almaz in parallel. The result was named "Salyut (Salute)" as a tribute to the late Yuri Gagarin.
The Salyut space station was put into orbit on top of a Proton booster. If the Zond flights had accomplished nothing else, they had at least validated the Proton to the status of a reliable launch vehicle. The lift capacity of the Proton restricted the weight of the Salyut to the lift capability of the Proton, 20 tonnes (22 tons), while the diameter of the Salyut was limited to four meters (4.4 yards) by the clearance of railroad tunnels.
Salyut was basically just a big "can", or more precisely a set of cans stacked on top of each other. It included living and work areas; a propulsion system derived from the Soyuz propulsion system was fitted on the bottom, while a docking adapter was fitted on top. Four solar arrays provided power. Like MOL, the station could not be resupplied in any serious way, and once its expendables were gone, it would be deorbited. The Soyuz capsule would be used as a ferry.
As a step towards the flight of Salyut, on 1 June 1970 the Soviets launched "Soyuz 9", carrying Adrian Nikolayev, a veteran of Vostok 3, and Vitaly Sevastyanov on a mission that lasted 17.7 days, the longest space mission to that time. The Soyuz 9 flight was performed to confirm that humans could endure long duration space missions.
"Salyut 1" was finally launched on 19 April 1971 into low Earth orbit. It was followed on 22 April by the first operational ferry spacecraft, "Soyuz 10". Soyuz 10 carried a crew of three, including Vladimir Shatalov, Alexey Yelisayev, and Nikolai Rukavishnikov. Unfortunately, they couldn't dock with the station and were forced to return to Earth.
The Soviets launched a second crew to Salyut 1 on "Soyuz 11" on 6 June 1971. The crew was Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev, and Vladislav Volkov. They spent several weeks in the station, but various failures, including a fire, forced their return in their Soyuz on 29 June 1971. The reentry module appeared to land safely, but when the recovery team found the capsule, all was still. When they opened it up, they found all three cosmonauts dead.
There was some worry that the long duration flight had done them some harm, possibly weakening their hearts, but there was a more obvious explanation for the tragedy. As it turned out, a pressure equalization valve had opened at high altitude; since the Soyuz was a tight fit for three cosmonauts, they weren't wearing spacesuits, and they all suffocated. This time, the Soviets accepted NASA's request to send an astronaut to the funeral, and Tom Stafford did the honors as a good-will gesture.
The accident grounded the Soviet manned space program for a year. The Soyuz would not be flown with three crew again for a long time, and the crew would always wear spacesuits. The Salyut 1 space station never took on a second crew, and was de-orbited over the Pacific Ocean on 11 October 1972.
General Nikolai Kamanin left his post as leader of the cosmonaut corps shortly after the Soyuz 11 accident and went into retirement. Although the details are unclear, it appears that he was dismissed. Since it is hard to see how he might have been blamed in any way for the accident, it seems more plausible that he lost his temper, made too many loud accusations, and offended the wrong people. He died in 1982, leaving behind a significant testament in the form of his diaries, which became available in the West after the fall of the USSR and provide an irreplaceable resource. The diaries have to be taken with a bit of salt, however, since it is believed that he edited them later to add the benefit of hindsight.
* After the cliffhanger misadventure of Apollo 13, all the following Apollo missions went off safely. "Apollo 14" was launched on 31 January 1971, the crew consisting of Alan Shepard, Stu Roosa, and Ed Mitchell. The service module oxygen tanks that had caused so much trouble for Apollo 13 had been fixed, and a third oxygen tank was fitted into the command module.
Shepard had made a surprise comeback. Being grounded by Meniere's disease had been a major blow to his big ego, and it had made all the jagged edges of his personality that much sharper. The Apollo 1 fire in early 1967 took him even deeper into the shadow. The six surviving Mercury Seven astronauts had been pallbearers at Grissom's funeral, where jets flew over in a "missing man" formation and riflemen fired a 21-gun salute. After the funeral he went with the astronauts and a few others for a drink. They were astounded to see Shepard say: "I hate those empty-slot flyovers." -- with tears pouring down his face.
He had been severe with the astronauts in his care before, but now he became downright savage. Shepard felt that it had been everyone's sloppiness, his own haste and carelessness, that had killed -- murdered -- the Apollo 1 crew, and he became totally intolerant of mistakes. Deke Slayton finally got him alone and asked: "Don't you think you're being a little tough on the guys?" Shepard admitted that he was, they talked it out, and things got a bit better.
However, the underlying causes of dissatisfaction remained and gnawed at Shepard. He had actually lobbied to be on the Apollo 1 mission, trying to convince the doctors that his affliction was under the control. It was to an extent, but not enough to make the doctors happy. They turned him down, ironically saving him from an ugly death.
People began to see he was turning an emotional corner. There was a public banquet in Shepard's honor on 6 May 1967, the sixth anniversary of the FREEDOM 7 shot, with the proceeds to go to the Ed White Memorial Scholarship Fund. About 500 people attended and Shepard was energetically roasted and harassed. He took it and gave some of it back, but then he got serious, talking about the frantic days six years past, when everyone wanted to beat the Soviets into space at absolutely any cost -- except for Wernher von Braun, who thought things weren't quite ready and wanted one more Redstone shot before sending up Shepard.
Shepard had been bitterly angry at von Braun then, but six years on and with Gus Grissom dead, somehow the race to be first didn't matter as much as it had. Shepard looked straight at von Braun from the podium and told him he had made the right and mature judgement call: "It exonerates the careful judgement of you men who placed success over temporary propaganda advantage." Listeners were downright shocked that Shepard would get up in public and admit that he had been wrong; the applause was deafening. When it finally ended, Shepard called for everyone to take responsibility to ensure that no such accidents happened in the future, and said it was time to get on with the job.
Soon Shepard's health began to turn the corner as well. In the summer of 1968, Tom Stafford told him about meeting a surgeon who had developed a technique for curing Meniere's disease. Shepard jumped at the chance, even though the surgeon told him the technique was unproven and at worst might make him deaf in one ear, guaranteeing that he would never fly in space again. The surgery involved inserting a small silicone tube into his inner ear so that the buildup of fluid would drain into his spinal fluid. Shepard kept quiet about the operation until he was sure it was effective, and then went into Slayton's office to tell him -- not ask him, tell him: "Get me a flight to the Moon."
Gordo Cooper was expecting to be commander of the Apollo 13 mission, but Deke Slayton had never really regarded Cooper as rating command of a Moon flight. Cooper was a good pilot, to be sure, but he was less than meticulous about taking care of everything on his plate. Slayton thought Cooper was more interested in car and boat racing than in being an astronaut, and didn't hesitate to hand Shepard the slot for command of the Apollo 13 mission.
However, astronaut Jim McDivitt, who was running the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, protested to NASA management that Shepard wasn't up to speed yet and shouldn't command the Apollo 13 flight. The management overruled Shepard and Slayton, but instead of giving command of the flight to Cooper, they gave it to Jim Lovell, who was then training for Apollo 14. Shepard would take Apollo 14 in Lovell's place. Although there were those who didn't like Shepard shoving his way in, Chris Kraft summed up the consensus on Shepard: "He stayed with the program. He paid his dues."
It was the last straw for Cooper, and he held a grudge against Shepard for years. He quit NASA in 1970, dabbling as a consultant and in a number of business ventures, working as an executive with Walt Disney Corporation for a time. He also became an enthusiastic UFO conspiracy advocate; late in his life he would write a memoir littered with stories that might have seemed more or less plausible individually, but collectively gave the impression that if he had ever had a strong grip on details and reality, he'd lost it somewhere along the way. However, although he did insist that he had repeatedly chased UFOs over Germany in his USAF F-86 fighter during the early 1950s, he was still careful to deny rumors that he, or for that matter any of his colleagues, had seen a UFO while they were in space. Cooper died of heart failure on 4 October 2004.
* The command switch between Apollo 13 and 14 of course proved to be another lucky break for Shepard. Almost every time Lovell ran into Shepard after the Apollo 13 cliffhanger, Lovell, always a bit of a clown, would say: "Any time you want Apollo 13 back, Al, you can have it." Actually, in some ways Shepard might have envied Lovell, who had become, of course in a way he wouldn't have chosen, one of the enduring heroes of the Moon race.
Shepard immersed himself in his training. He was out of the shadows now. People working with him in preparation for the mission found him far more pleasant, easy to get along with, and even inspiring than anyone could recall. Stu Roosa nicknamed him "Fearless Leader", and not entirely as a joke. After almost a decade on the ground, Shepard was going back into space, and this time to walk on the Moon.
Apollo 14 was a "science" mission, intended to accomplish the tasks Apollo 13 was supposed to have performed. The launch went fine, but the mission came close to failure shortly after the boost out of Earth orbit towards the Moon. The crew had great troubles docking the CSM, "Kitty Hawk", to the LEM, "Antares", on the outbound mission. They got more aggressive in docking procedures and managed to mate on their third and final permissible attempt. Had they failed to link up, they would have been able to perform a circumlunar mission but not land.
There were other problems. As the astronauts were preparing to descend to the lunar surface and were performing preflights on the LEM, its abort system activated. Since it was still mated to the CSM at the time, this did no harm, but it wouldn't be acceptable once Antares cast off from Kitty Hawk. There seemed to be an intermittent short in a switch that was causing the problem, and it did go away when Roosa rapped on the control panel, but there was no saying it might not come right back at the worst possible time. Ground engineers quickly rewrote software and uploaded it to work around the problem.
Then, on the descent, the LEM's landing radar went out. The rules said the crew would have to abort the mission if they didn't have landing radar. Shepard rebooted the radar, it came back on line, and they were able to complete the landing. After touchdown, Mitchell wondered if Shepard would have continued on down even if the radar hadn't come back up, asking him: "What would you have done?" Shepard replied: "You'll never know." Roosa remained in orbit on board Kitty Hawk, performing observations. He had been given training by Farouk el-Baz and had taken it to heart.
Antares set down on the Fra Mauro highlands, on the edge of the Ocean of Storms. The terrain at the landing site was much more rugged than had been the case for the previous two missions, and the astronauts had so much trouble finding their way around that they didn't have time to visit all their sample sites. Part of the problem was that the Moon lacked familiar features, such as trees or structures, that the astronauts would have used without thinking on Earth to gauge distances or to orient themselves.
They carried scientific gear using a two-wheeled cart, formally known as the "modular equipment transport (MET)" but more informally called the "lunar rickshaw". It turned out to be a bad idea, since it got bogged down in the moondust. However, the astronauts managed to plant a second ALSEP and laser reflector. One of the high points of the mission was when Shepard attached a specially built golf club head to one of his tools, and used the improvised iron to drive a golf ball across the lunar surface. CAPCOM Fred Haise, watching on TV, commented: "Looked like a slice to me."
Shepard wasn't buying it: "Straight as a die. Miles and miles!"
Other than that, the mission was uneventful, though sleep time on the desolate Moon was eerie. Every little noise that the LEM made as it shifted slightly caused a faint burst of apprehension, Shepard saying: "What the hell was that?!"
Mitchell replied: "I don't know."
"Ed?"
"What?"
"Why are we whispering?"
Antares lifted off after over 33 hours on the Moon, hooked up with Kitty Hawk without problems, and the crew landed back on Earth on 9 February. They came back to little public fanfare. Although the Apollo 13 scareride had commanded headlines, Apollo 14 was almost a back-page item. There was a war on in Southeast Asia that was still sending boys home in coffins every week, with the Nixon Administration desperately searching for a way to get the country out of the quagmire. There was public agitation over many things, in hindsight some sensible and some hysterical. America had been to the Moon before; doing it again was old news.
* After the flight, Shepard saw a newspaper headline that ran: "Astronaut Does ESP Experiment On Moon Flight". It explained how one of the Apollo 14 astronauts had performed a typical ESP test, reading cards with geometric patterns with a remote (in this case, very remote) witness guessing which figures were being read. Shepard called to Mitchell: "Hey, Ed, did you see this? This is the funniest goddam thing I ever saw."
Mitchell came over and took a look at the article, then told Shepard: "I did it, boss." He had sneaked in the test during his sleep time. Mitchell hadn't made any secret of his interest in parapsychology before the flight, almost leading Deke Slayton to yank him off the mission because it didn't seem like the right sort of attitude. Shepard had insisted that Mitchell was a perfectly competent astronaut and kept him on. Shepard was momentarily shocked that Mitchell had pulled such a stunt without clearing it with his mission commander, but let it ride. After being one of the few people who had, or in his lifetime ever would, step on the Moon, Shepard was feeling mellow: he'd achieved just about everything he had wanted to achieve, so there was less reason to be pushy. Shepard later said: "Before I went to the Moon I was a rotten SOB. Now I'm just an SOB."
Alan Shepard retired from NASA in 1974 to become a full-time businessman. Although some of the astronauts who had been to the Moon went through periods of drift and disorientation later, Shepard already had one foot in the business world and putting in the other foot was the natural next step. Already prosperous, he became very wealthy. On the basis of his golf shots on the Moon he got into the professional golf circuit, though he was marginally pro quality: to his disgust, SPORT ILLUSTRATED listed him as one of the 100 worst athletes of modern times, and he would eventually have to drop out of the pro circuit. To the astonishment of many who had known the old "looking out for number one" Alan Shepard, he also became an energetic philanthropist. He died of leukemia on 22 July 1998; his wife Louise followed him only a few weeks later, dying of a heart attack while on a commuter flight.
Stu Roosa and his wife went to a trip to Nepal in 1975. The couple did not know that some Nepalese believe the spirits of their dead reside on the Moon, making it the equivalent of heaven. Roosa could not understand why a few of the local citizens treated him like a god, nor why they were distressed when he told them he saw no one else on the Moon.
* "Apollo 15" was launched on 26 July 1971, the crew consisting of Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden. This was the first long-duration "J mission", intended to provide a much more comprehensive set of scientific observations than previous Apollo missions.
The CSM featured a new "Scientific Instrument Module bay (SIMbay)" that contained eight scientific experiments, including two panoramic cameras; spectrometers; and a "particles and fields" subsatellite that was to be put into orbit around the Moon. The subsatellite had a simple instrument suite, as well as a transponder that allowed its orbit to be precisely tracked from Earth, allowing researchers to map lunar gravity fields.
Weight reductions in the Saturn V permitted the booster to lift a bigger payload, and so the LEM had been modified to carry more water, oxygen, and other supplies to permit longer stays on the Moon, with electrical power storage capacity increased accordingly. The lander's engine was uprated to handle the greater weight. The astronauts were fitted with improved spacesuits for longer trips outside. The new suits were also more flexible, and allowed the astronaut to take a drink from a tube and chew off a bit of a dried fruit strip.
The LEM also carried a battery-powered "Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV)" or "Moon buggy" that the astronauts would ride on the Moon. It was a particularly clever piece of gear, built by Boeing with help from Delco Electronics, and folded up neatly along the side of the descent stage. The buggy was automatically unfolded and deployed by tugging on lanyards. When Boeing engineers demonstrated deployment of the rover to their Grumman counterparts working on the LEM, the Grumman engineers broke into applause.
The rover was basically just a flat frame with a wheel on each corner. The wheels were made of wire mesh, woven around a core structure of titanium bands. Tool racks and sample storage bins were mounted between the rear wheels, while the batteries and electronics were mounted between the front wheels. The astronauts sat side-by-side on folding seats mounted on the middle of the frame, and drove using a tee-stick control mounted between the seats to allow either astronaut to drive. The original plan was to use a joystick, but astronaut feedback indicated that grasping a joystick in a Moon suit was troublesome.
A TV camera was mounted up front, while a 16 millimeter color film camera was mounted on the right side. A parasol-shaped high gain antenna, used to relay TV images to Earth, was mounted up front. Of course, the high-gain antenna had to be pointed at Earth, so the TV camera was useless while the buggy was bouncing over rough lunar terrain. A less prominent low-gain antenna was used for normal communications.
Scott and Irwin had gone on Lee Silver's field trips, along with Schmitt and others, and Scott had become a gung-ho "rockhound". Even before the field trips with Silver, he had built up a rock collection at his home. He had become an "inside man" for Shoemaker and the other geologists, lobbying to add tools and tasks for geological research when NASA officials tried to eliminate them.
The launch and the flight to the Moon went without trouble, the only real surprise being when the LEM, "Falcon", landed on the Moon with a head-rattling thud. The hard landing was because Falcon was substantially heavier than its predecessors; fortunately, nothing was broken. Worden remained in the CSM, "Endeavor", and performed observations from lunar orbit, exploiting training he had received from the Pharaoh and tending the sophisticated instruments provided in the SIMbay.
The Falcon's landing site was positioned between the Lunar Apennine mountains and a deep gorge named Hadley Rille, providing varied terrain for study. Scott and Irwin spent almost three days on the Moon, exploring for about half that time. Their new-model spacesuits were easier to take on or off inside the LEM, and they were able to spend three days on the Moon in reasonable comfort, though the long work sessions outside were exhausting. The worst problem was that the gloves were thick and hard to manipulate, wearing out their hands and pressing against their fingernails until they turned black.
They were able to conduct extended surveys using the Moon Rover, ranging up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Falcon. They could have gone farther, but they were limited by their oxygen supply, since the rules said they couldn't go farther than they could walk if their vehicle broke down. The Rover turned out to be enormous fun, even though it couldn't really go much faster than a sprinter back on Earth. Tooling around on rough terrain in such a deadly environment turned out be a major thrillride.
Lee Silver and the other geologists were watching over the Moon crew's shoulders from back on Earth, and were ecstatic over the good work the two men were doing, performing astute observations, taking rock samples, and even with great effort punching some surface cores. When Dave Scott was trying to take a core sample and reared back to take a serious jab at the Moon's hard surface, CAPCOM Joe Allen commented: "Careful you don't puncture it!" Deke Slayton kept the crack as his favorite astronaut gag.
Before they left the Moon, Scott and Irwin planted a plaque honoring fourteen astronauts and cosmonauts who had been killed since the beginning of the space race, including the Soyuz 11 crew, lost only weeks before. Return to the Endeavour turned out to be troublesome, with Glynn Lunney of Mission Control finding it extremely difficult to walk the crew through the LEM separation procedures. It was finally done, and the difficulty turned out to be that Scott and Irwin were so exhausted that they were near-zombies. Once things were settled out, they were ordered to get some rest.
Endeavour stayed in lunar orbit two more days to make observations and deploy the subsatellite. On the way back home, Worden performed a spacewalk to retrieve photographic film and other materials from the SIMbay, a ritual that would be repeated on the remaining Apollo Moon missions.
The astronauts returned safely to Earth on 7 August. One of the three parachutes didn't deploy properly, but it ended up being just another safe if slightly harder landing. They were the first Moon landing crew not to be quarantined, since it was obvious by that time that there was no realistic possibility they might bring a killer bug back with them. Most of the astronauts had thought there was no chance of it in the first place, and were very happy to be done with the nonsense.
There was fallout from the mission later. The astronauts had taken 400 stamped envelopes to the Moon, and had arranged for a German stamp dealer to sell a hundred of them. The astronauts stood to make a few thousand dollars off the deal, but the dealer didn't live up to the terms of their agreement and they refused to take money from him. Still, it became public news, and there was a scandal, which expanded when it turned out some astronauts on earlier flights had taken advantage of the same deal.
The astronauts were reprimanded, some lost flight slots, and in the future all materials carried on a spaceflight would have to be checked and cleared. Deke Slayton was particularly annoyed with Dave Scott, who was a hardass about the rules and quick to jump on others who he thought weren't flying right; Slayton concluded Scott was a sucker for money.
* "Apollo 16" was launched on 16 April 1972, the crew consisting of John Young, Tom Mattingly, and Charlie Duke. This was Young's second trip to the Moon, since he had been part of the Apollo 10 circumlunar expedition. This time he would get to land.
The geologists had lobbied for a landing in the region of Tycho, one of the Moon's youngest large craters. It is vividly visible even with a small telescope from Earth, with bright "rays" extending outward from where the debris of the impact spattered outward. However, Jim McDivitt looked over Lunar Orbiter pictures of the rugged terrain in that region and told the geologists: "You will go to Tycho over my dead body."
In addition, Tycho was well off the lunar equator, which meant that the Apollo CSM would have to carry more fuel to adjust its lunar orbit for a landing there. This would reduce the payload the spacecraft could carry and also the margin of safety if there was another Apollo 13-type accident. The geologists chose a plateau in the Descartes Mountains regions instead, since its features seemed to show evidence of volcanic activity in the past.
The launch and trip out was a milk run. Mattingly rode in the CSM, "Casper", in orbit around the Moon while Young and Duke cast off took the LEM, "Orion", to ride down to the surface. However, the two vehicles were in eyeball distance of each other when Mattingly discovered a potentially hazardous anomaly in the flight control system: the launch abort indicator seemed to be stuck ON.
Mattingly wasn't sure there was a real problem, but he couldn't be sure there wasn't, and so Casper and Orion had to fly formation for hours while Mission Control scrambled for an answer. Mission Control finally came up system workarounds and procedures to allow the landing to go ahead. This was a relief to the crew, since if they'd hung fire much longer they would have been forced to scrub the landing.
Apollo 16 was similar in duration to Apollo 15, with a stay of just under three days on the lunar surface, and also included a Moon buggy in which Young and Duke explored the lunar terrain. They planted a third ALSEP, though a cable to one of the experiments broke; set up an ultraviolet camera to perform astronomical observations; and, with considerable effort, drilled some core samples. A second particles and fields satellite was released from the CSM as well.
Orion's return to lunar orbit was watched live from Earth using the TV camera on the Moon buggy. The LEM hooked up OK and was discarded, and the astronauts completed their orbital observations. The return trip was as straightforward as the outbound journey. The crew landed safely on 27 April.
* The final mission, "Apollo 17", was launched on 7 December 1972, the crew consisting of Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, and geologist Jack Schmitt.
Cernan had come close to not merely losing out on commanding a Moon landing mission but losing his life. NASA kept a number of old Bell Model 47 light helicopters as primitive LEM trainers, and on 23 January 1971 Cernan had taken one up. He got to "hot dogging" the machine for the entertainment of vacationers on a nearby beach, and clipped the surface of the water with one of the helicopter's landing skids.
The helicopter immediately crashed in a fireball and sank; finding himself at the bottom, Cernan managed to get to the surface without being decapitated by the rotor blades, which were still turning, only to find himself surrounded by burning fuel. He kept trying to dive and dodge out of the flames, gradually bogging down in his flight suit and boots, to be pulled out of the water at the last desperate moment by a woman in a boat.
He was very thoroughly beaten up but not seriously injured. Deke Slayton asked him: "So, when exactly did the engine quit on you?" Cernan didn't want to show any weakness, but being a weasel would have been a weakness too, so he answered: "Deke, the engine didn't quit. I just flew the son-of-a-bitch into the water." They went through the same routine again; Deke shrugged and told Cernan: "OK, if that's the way you want it."
Cernan thought his astronaut flight career had been ended, but Slayton shrugged the matter off. Cernan later believed that his honesty had impressed Slayton. It didn't go any higher, either, since the NASA brass were preoccupied with the Apollo 14 mission at the time. The accident was mentioned in the news, but there were much hotter headlines for the moment and the accident was of very little public interest.
Jack Schmitt had been something of a last-minute switch. Originally Schmitt had been in the backup crew, with Joe Engle in the prime slot instead, but when the geoscientists found out that the last Apollo mission wouldn't, finally, include a scientist, they raised flaming hell. Shoemaker had wanted a geologist to be the first man on the Moon; failing that, at least one of the last men on the Moon had to be one.
Deke Slayton was not keen on including Schmitt on Apollo 17. Deke felt that Schmitt's qualifications were good, it was just that Joe Engle's qualifications were better. Slayton felt that putting a geologist on the Moon would be "nice", but it wasn't really part of his criteria for flight selections. That was exactly the attitude that infuriated the science community. NASA management had to admit they were in an embarrassing position, having made concessions to the science community only to suggest they were meaningless in the end, and made the switch.
The announcement of Schmitt's selection was on the news before he was formally informed, and he absolutely refused to believe it when his friends, even his sister, called up to congratulate him, replying angrily: "It's not true!" He only accepted it when he got the official word.
Cernan wasn't happy with having Schmitt on board, either. It wasn't just loyalty to Joe Engle. Schmitt wasn't part of the test pilot crowd, and he made little or no attempt to fit in. He had probably recognized it would be futile, even degrading, to try, but in any case he came across as standoffish and abrasive. Ron Evans' wife Jan put the attitude of the clique towards him bluntly: "We have to put up with that asshole?"
Slayton had seen the writing on the wall and Schmitt was going to fly, no matter what anyone thought of him. Slayton let Cernan gripe about Schmitt's assignment for a while, and then laid down the law: "You want to fly, then you fly with Jack, like it or not. Tell me right now. I've got work to do, either way."
Cernan didn't have any choice but to agree. He had some difficulties with Schmitt at first, not just because of the difference in mindsets, but because Schmitt, used to lobbying the case for the scientist astronauts with NASA brass, didn't hesitate to go over Cernan's head. Cernan made it clear that the military chain of command would be observed; he wasn't going to fly with any crewman who could not be counted on to obey his orders. Schmitt fell in line, working energetically to prepare for the mission. The test-pilot astronauts had always been leery of the scientist astronauts because of the suspicion that they wouldn't be able to carry their weight as flight crew, but Cernan was impressed by Schmitt, who single-mindedly mastered his flight duties as well as any test pilot.
There was a moment of apprehension during the countdown up to the launch when it was halted at the 30-second mark. The crew worried that the mission would be scrubbed, but it was just delayed for a few hours while the ground crews fixed the problem. The crew rested, with Evans snoring so loud that the others complained. They launched after midnight, the only nighttime launch in the Moon flights; the Saturn V was said to have lit up much of the southern Atlantic coast like a second sun. The normally taciturn Schmitt was so excited that he wouldn't shut up, making his colleagues wonder if they were actually flying with his secret twin brother.
Evans remained in the CSM, "America", while Cernan and Schmitt landed the LEM, "Challenger", in the Littrow Valley of the Taurus Mountains. One of the things that Schmitt had been lobbying for was a landing in the region of the crater Tsiolkovsky, on the lunar farside, using the CSM to relay communications as it orbited the Moon, or preferably using Moon-orbiting relay satellites launched from Earth on a Titan booster. It was an interesting idea, some of the NASA staff did some planning work on a bootleg basis, but the money for Moon exploration was fading away and it couldn't happen.
The two astronauts spent slightly over three days on the Moon, exploring in their LRV and collecting samples. Their rover was equipped with a unique lightweight color TV camera for live broadcasts to Earth; instead of three camera tubes, one for red, one for green, and one for blue as used the conventional, heavy color TV cameras of the time, it used one camera tube viewing through a spinning red-green-blue color wheel. The color signal the lightweight camera produced wasn't compatible with normal color TV signals, but a bank of gear back on Earth performed the necessary signal conversion.
One major problem came up when the rover lost a fender, the result being that the astronauts ended up being covered by the charcoal-dark moondust when they drove around. This was not a trivial annoyance, either, because it caused the suits to seriously overheat. They finally managed to improvise a fender using some folded-up maps and -- that eternal life-saver -- duct tape.
They worked like dogs, trying to take as many samples and gather as much information as they could in the time they had on the Moon. Schmitt pushed himself as hard as he could, knowing this was his only shot at it. Cernan was impressed, swallowing all the misgivings he had ever had, later writing: "Jack Schmitt belonged up there, and more than proved his worth."
As Cernan got back into the LEM for the last time, he made a few comments appropriate to the situation: "As I take these last steps from the surface for some time in the future to come, I'd just like to record that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the Moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for mankind."
It was a fine sentiment, but Schmitt's reaction was to blast steam out his ears. The idea that this was the last mission to the Moon for the duration left him burning with rage, and decades later he would insist that it still made him angry to think about it. However he felt about it, it was still the truth: Cernan and Schmitt boosted off the Moon's surface and nobody would return in the 20th century. After the crew returned to lunar orbit and performed observations, Mission Control radioed them the Doors' "Light My Fire" to wake them up; they lit it and boosted for home, to Earth. They landed on 19 December. The last manned lunar mission of the 20th century was over.
* The Soviet effort was effectively dead by this time, having never come close to sending a cosmonaut anywhere near the Moon. Vasily Mishin tried to push on with the effort, reorganizing the program to perform extended Moon landings that would be of much longer duration than the Apollo journeys, and had what he felt was a workable plan by early 1974. The axe fell in May 1974, when Glushko finally obtained control over Mishin's OKB-1. Ten N-1 boosters were in construction at the time, with two effectively flight ready, but Glushko ordered them scrapped and terminated the program. Some of the booster airframe sections were cut in half lengthwise and set up as "Quonset huts".
The Soviets continued to launch their highly successful robot missions at a low rate for a few years after the last Apollo landing:
Both the US and the USSR gave up on Moon exploration for the time being. Vasily Mishin would remain in an academic position, sworn to secrecy about his role in the Soviet manned Moon program until the fall of the USSR. He would claim that everyone knew from the outset that the Soviets couldn't win the Moon race since the resources simply weren't there, though cosmonaut Alexey Leonov would dispute that, insisting that it could have been done had bureaucracy not hobbled the program. Mishin died in 2001.
