Posted on 12/06/2002 2:42:17 AM PST by weegee
The ultimate strangers in a strange land, travel-weary astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt huddled in their tiny Apollo 17 lunar lander, ate military-issue omelets, harmonized "good morning to you" and stumbled through a silly parody of The Night Before Christmas.
The date was Dec. 14, 1972, the day America retreated from the moon.
Apollo 17, launched 30 years ago Saturday, represents the closing chapter in an awe-inspiring series of a half-dozen, 240,000-mile expeditions that unfolded over a dizzying 42 months. The Apollo program delivered a dozen American astronauts to the moon's rugged terrain for an unprecedented, firsthand look at another world.
Cernan and Schmitt had spent 75 hours on the lunar surface in a boulder-strewn, mountain valley known as Taurus-Littrow. While there, they took three grueling moon walks totaling 22 hours and covered 20 miles in a battery-powered lunar rover, collecting samples of the craters, rocks and mountain slopes.
Giddy with exhaustion, they were ready to come home.
As their final day on the moon wore on, light-hearted banter with Mission Control in Houston became serious as Cernan, the commander, and Schmitt, the pilot, turned their attention to the checklist they had to complete before the fragile spacecraft could leave for Earth.
Finally, at 4:56 p.m. CST, Cernan turned to Schmitt for a final exchange, "OK, Jack, let's get this mother outta here."
Schmitt jabbed a control panel button that sparked the spacecraft's ascent rocket in response and announced, "Ignition."
With those last words, the boxy lunar lander leaped away in a cloud of dust and gravel. Cernan, the last human to walk on the moon, and Schmitt, the only trained scientist ever to make the voyage, were headed back to Earth with 243 pounds of moon rocks.
A decade earlier, President Kennedy had rallied America to the moon to counter Cold War fears of the Soviet Union's missile superiority.
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first explorers to reach the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, easing the sting of two previous Soviet space triumphs. But after Apollo 11 and a near-disaster with Apollo 13, political and financial support for NASA's $100 billion lunar exploration extravaganza dwindled.
By the fall of 1970, plans for Apollos 18, 19 and 20 were canceled. Apollo 17 would be the last.
As the final flight of the Apollo program lifted off in fiery nighttime fury from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Dec. 7, 1972, President Nixon had just won re-election to the White House, despite the unfolding Watergate scandal and domestic discord over race relations and the Vietnam War.
Middle-class Americans worried about the economy, trooped to see The Godfather in movie theaters and tuned their televisions to All in the Family.
NASA, meanwhile, was busy pioneering the miniaturization of computers, pushing the boundaries of long-distance communication, probing Mars with robotic spacecraft, and orchestrating its last lunar-landing mission.
For Apollo 17, the space agency chose a crew in keeping with a tradition of selecting accomplished military aviators, with one important distinction.
Cernan, a 38-year-old Navy officer with experience aboard Gemini 9 and Apollo 10, was chosen to lead the mission.
Ron Evans, 39, another Navy aviator, was picked to staff the lunar module, the transit capsule that circled the moon while the other astronauts descended to the surface in the lander.
But the choice of Schmitt, 37, was an entirely different story. Politically astute and professionally ambitious, he was a Harvard University-trained geologist.
Before joining NASA, he was among a group of U.S. Geological Survey scientists the space agency had assembled to train astronauts to collect rocks and soil and to interpret what they saw on the moon's surface.
After joining the astronaut corps himself in 1965, Schmitt trained as a fighter pilot, then as the backup lunar lander module pilot for Apollo 15.
He was in line to serve as prime pilot aboard Apollo 18, 19 or 20. But when those missions were canceled, he became the focus of an intense lobbying campaign by the global science community to join Apollo 17.
Scientists argued that the final manned lunar landing needed its own geologist, and NASA listened.
The agency gave the last spot to Schmitt, replacing Joe Engle, an astronaut and X-15 test pilot who had trained with Cernan and Evans for a year.
If Schmitt's promotion was a manifestation of the higher priority NASA assigned to scientific scrutiny in the last manned trip to the moon, so was the landing site.
Just nine months before the launch, NASA chose Taurus-Littrow, satisfying all but those who wanted to touch down on the far side of the moon.
Flyovers by previous missions had spotted a darkened material around craters in the highland region of the moon's northeast quadrant, suggesting the remnants of volcanic activity. Intrigued scientists thought samples might furnish clues of the moon's internal processes.
They knew that at some point in the solar system's first half-billion years, a mountain-size asteroid or comet had struck the moon, carving away the inaptly named Sea of Serenity, a basin more than 400 miles in diameter. The force of the impact had unearthed great blocks of rocks that ringed the depression with mountains.
Some of the massive rocks on the peaks then rolled away, carving away mountain valleys, among them Taurus-Littrow. Later, volcanic lava flows had belched from the moon's interior and filled in the lowest terrain.
Taurus-Littrow, the geologists reasoned, must be a treasure trove of both ancient and recent lunar history.
Apollo 17's explorations did not disappoint.
Bidding Evans a temporary farewell in lunar orbit, Cernan and Schmitt began their descent. In order to reach their intended destination, Cernan skillfully steered and rolled the lander over the 6,500-foot tops of the Taurus mountains. He settled the spacecraft into the narrow valley between two mountain bases with pinpoint accuracy.
During their second moonwalk, Schmitt's trained eye spotted a glassy orange-tinged material scattered in the soil at the base of the crater Camelot.
The so-called "orange soil," which later was discovered among the samples returned from the Apollo 15 mission, remains a factor in the long-running debate over the moon's origins.
According to the prevailing theory, the Earth had been grazed in the distant past by a second planet-size object. The severed debris eventually reassembled into the moon.
However, the chemical signature of the "orange soil" suggests another origin. The lead, platinum and tungsten content of the strange soil are similar to those found in meteorites that comprised the materials left over from the formation of the solar system.
If the "orange soil" was harbored in the lunar interior until it was deposited on the moon's surface volcanically, the moon probably formed close to but independently of the Earth. Later, the moon was captured by the Earth's gravitational field.
Twelve days after Apollo 17's liftoff from Earth, the command module capsule carrying Cernan, Schmitt and Evans splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, where the astronauts were safely recovered by the USS Ticonderoga, a World War II vintage aircraft carrier.
For the moment, America rejoiced.
Cernan and Schmitt left NASA but prospered from their experiences. Evans died of a heart attack in 1990.
With the passage of time, the nation's decision to confine human space exploration close to the Earth left the youngest Americans to question whether their forebears really ever accomplished the miracle of Apollo.
They did.
Sources: Cernan's book, The Last Man on the Moon; the Apollo 17 Lunar Surface Journal; Donald A. Beattie's Taking Science to the Moon: Lunar Experiments and the Apollo Program; and NASA.
You know who you are.
Yeah, but if you left it up to private enterprise, they'd naturally use the moon as a nuclear wasted dump, which would eventually explode, sending the moon and Martin Landau hurtling through the interstellar void at faster than light speed (except when it entered another planetary system, at which time it would spontaneously slow down for a little while).
But the other two? They were laid down on the lawn, in front of the NASA facilities in Houston and Huntsville, becoming the world's most expensive lawn ornaments!
The two final examples of one of the supreme technological achievements of the human race, fully rated and approved for use in manned flight ... becoming rusting trophies for the eyes of NASA bureaucrats. A sour and ignominious end.
Oh, and the original technical specs for the Saturn V, several tons of them, were sold years earlier as waste paper. They couldn't build it again even if we wanted to do so!
I hope you'll forgive a quote from Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, in their novel, Fallen Angels ...
If it weren't for f**king NASA, then we could have walked on Mars.
If I cannot get to orbit, then I'll never reach the stars.
Portugal, hell. We're no more than the Ace Boondoggle-Alpha Space Trucking Company. What a damnable waste of opportunity. Even I'm starting to wonder if we deserved the achievement that I saw in 1969 at the age of ten.
It cannot possibly have been thirty years. Can it?
Yes, but they might as well have not.
Buzz Aldrin decked a man who had stalked him for an ambused interview (this occurred after I met Neil). Other astronauts have agreed that they get their share of "coverup" letters. One said that he not only gets the "c'mon, tell us that you never really went to the moon" letters, he also gets the "c'mon, tells us what you really saw on the moon" letters.
I'm aware of no direct threat, but like the public's lack of sense when they encounter one of the Beatles (even to this day), I'm sure that every day has a potential crowd control problems.
The one good thing about Al Gore, in my opinion, is that he's a computer geek. He's never an arms-reach away from his PDA. We all know about his claim that he invented the Internet.
Born in 1975, I'm too young to have lived through the Mercury, Geminini and Apollo missions. Videos of those missions is just history to me like December 7, 1941 is to Baby Boomers and September 11th will be to my children. A manned Mars mission with American leadership would be just thing to revive NASA's raison d'etre otherwise it's very likely we'll one day see a red flag with yellow stars planted on that planet.
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