Apollo 17
Apollo leaves its final footprints on the Moon in a mission marked by several remarkable firsts. Fifty years on, Ezzy Pearson looks back
MISSION BRIEF
Launch date: 7 December 1972
Launch location: Launch Complex 39A
Landing location: Taurus–Littrow
Time on surface: 74 hours, 59 minutes, 39 seconds
Distance covered by lunar rover: 35.7km
Duration: 12 days, 13 hours, 51 minutes, 59 seconds
Return date: 19 December 1972
Main goals: Collect highland material; investigate past volcanic activity
Achievements: First mission launched at night, first professional geologist on the Moon, furthest travelled from lunar module, most distance covered overall, most lunar material collected, proof of volcanism found, taking the Blue Marble photo
Lunar module name: Challenger
Command module name: America
By the time Apollo 17 launched in December 1972, the world had fallen out of love with the Moon. Apollo missions 18 through to 20 had already been cancelled due to waning public interest and constraints on US government budgets, but many questioned why Apollo 17 was still happening when every mission looked identical.
To the science community, though, each landing provided valuable new insights. Knowing this would be the last mission, NASA was determined that Apollo 17 would have something no landing mission had had before: a trained geologist in the form of Howard ‘Jack’ Schmitt as lunar module pilot. Mission commander Gene Cernan wasn’t thrilled with the decision as Schmitt pushed out Joe Engle, whom both Cernan and Apollo 17 command module pilot Ronald Evans had served with on the Apollo 14 backup crew. Engle was also an experienced pilot and the landing site, Taurus–Littrow – a geologically interesting, but hazardous, mix of high- and lowlands – was the riskiest yet, so Cernan pushed for Engle. It was only when it was made clear Schmitt would fly with or without Cernan that he acquiesced. Luckily, the crew worked well together.
The launch was due on 6 December 1972 at 9:53pm local time, the programme’s only night launch.
Despite the late hour, 500,000 people came to watch as the clock ticked down from five minutes to one minute to 30 seconds… then stopped. There was a hold! Would the final Apollo mission be cancelled at the last moment? It transpired an oxygen tank had failed to pressurise. After manually setting it, the countdown recommenced.
At 12:33am EST on 7 December 1972, the final Saturn V launch rose into the air, golden flames blossoming behind it, brilliant as the Sun against the midnight blackness.
As we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17”
– Gene Cernan
A crew in high spirits
The crew arrived in lunar orbit three days later, with Cernan and Schmitt departing for the surface on 11 December. Despite the dangerous terrain, Cernan guided the lunar module (LM) to a textbook landing and just four hours later the first extravehicular activity (EVA) began.
“As I step off at the surface of Taurus–Littrow, we’d like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible,” said Cernan as he ventured onto the Moon. He followed this up by excitedly exclaiming, “Oh, my golly! Unbelievable!”, dispelling any notion that the last Apollo mission would be a melancholy affair.
Once Schmitt joined him, they began deploying the lunar rover and surface experiments. Keenly aware he could be the only geologist to conduct a field expedition on the Moon for a long time, Schmitt raced through his tasks – perhaps a little bit too briskly, as mission control, reading his suit’s temperature sensor, informed him “your exuberance is showing” and that he should calm down.
“Exuberance!” the geologist shot back, “I’ve never been calmer in my life,” before bounding over to nearby Steno crater, singing, “I was strolling on the Moon one day, in the merry, merry month of… December.”
After EVA 1, they returned to the LM to rest. The next day began with a spot of hasty repair work as Cernan had broken the rover’s fender the previous day. Dust sprayed up by the wheels covered everything, causing problems with overheating. They had attempted a fix it with duct tape, but the dust and thick gloves made it impossible. Overnight, engineers back on Earth designed a makeshift fender using an old map and more duct tape, while Apollo 16 commander John Young donned a spacesuit to practice attaching it. He talked the moonwalkers through the repair, allowing EVA 2 to begin.
The pair journeyed 7.6km – the furthest any human has ventured from a pressurised environment – to Nansen crater, which was next to a compact group of mountains called a massif. Cernan found the best way to handle the sloping terrain was to “cover ground like a kangaroo”, hopping on two legs. Schmitt wasn’t quite as graceful, though. When he fell over near the next station at Lara crater, mission control joked, “The switchboard here… has been lit up by calls from the Houston Ballet Foundation requesting your services for next season”. They renamed the area ‘Ballet crater’.
Any embarrassment Schmitt felt vanished at their next stop, Shorty crater. Schmitt was clearing away the top layer of dust with his foot to expose the material underneath when he saw something unexpected on the usually monotone Moon.
“Oh hey! There is orange soil!” he exclaimed.
One of the main reasons for coming to Taurus–Littrow was to look for evidence of past volcanic activity. The orange colour could be due to oxidisation, a strong indicator of volcanism. It later turned out the orange was caused by glass beads created by a type of volcano known as a fire fountain.
The pair spent as long as they could gathering samples, but they were coming up against their ‘walk back limit’, when they wouldn’t have enough oxygen to return to the LM on foot in an emergency. They had to end the EVA. Clocking in at seven hours and 36 minutes and having traversed 20.4km, it was the longest moonwalk of the programme and the pair retired for a well-earned night’s sleep.
Meet the astronauts
Commander: Eugene ‘Gene’ Cernan
Born on 14 March 1934, Cernan served as a fighter pilot in the Navy. He flew on Gemini 9 and had previously visited the Moon with Apollo 10 before being made commander of Apollo 17. He left NASA in 1976 to work in private business, but continued to commentate on space exploration. He died on 16 January 2017, aged 82.
Lunar module pilot: Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt
The only Apollo astronaut never to have served in the US military, Schmitt was born on 3 July 1935. Shortly after achieving his PhD in geology from Harvard University in 1965, he joined NASA and helped to train many other moonwalkers in geology field work. After Apollo 17, he took up politics, serving as a US senator.
Command module pilot: Ronald Evans
Born on 10 November 1933, Evans was a highly experienced Navy pilot having logged over 5,500 hours of flight time. After Apollo 17, his only spaceflight, Evans stayed at NASA to work on the Space Shuttle. He left in 1977, later working for Sperry Flight Systems who built components for the Shuttle. He died on 7 April 1990.
The view from above
While the moonwalkers exerted themselves on the surface, Evans wasn’t floating idle in the orbiting command module. He had his own programme, taking photos of the surface and using a new radar sounding device to image up to a kilometre beneath the lunar surface, as well as measuring temperature changes caused by the Moon going from day to night. He even watched the sunrise, sketching the solar corona as it peeked out over the horizon ahead of the Sun’s disc.
Back on the surface, Schmitt and Cernan began their final EVA, exploring North Massif. Near the first stop, they found a huge boulder split in two, calling it Tracy’s Rock after Cernan’s daughter. A clear track extended up the slope where it had rolled down from higher up, giving them an easy way to collect a highland sample without the long uphill trek to get it.
Before long, it was time to return to the LM to load up their haul of 741 samples, weighing in at 110.5kg – the largest of any Apollo mission – and close out the mission. Schmitt disposed of his geological hammer according to the old geologist tradition of hurling it into the distance before returning to the lunar module, leaving Cernan as the last human to walk the lunar surface.
“As we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.”
The next day the lunar module rose from the surface into the dark, reuniting with Evans a few hours later. On 16 December, the crew took their last look at the Moon’s surface and fired the engines towards home. Breaking the journey only for Evans to perform a 65-minute EVA to retrieve film casettes, they splashed down three days later, concluding one of the most audacious endeavours in human history.
Cernan in the lunar module alongside the astronauts’ moondust-covered spacesuits 
Schmitt prepares the rover for its final excursion 
This incredible shot of Earth’s full disc became known as the Blue Marble and remains an iconic image of the Apollo era 
Sketches by Ronald Evans of the solar corona over the lunar horizon
Apollo 17’s trove of samples has been analysed in laboratories, fuelling lunar science for half a century – one was even kept in cold storage for 50 years and only thawed out this spring. But perhaps the most well-known legacy of Apollo 17 was a single image, taken at the start of the mission. While flying away from home, one of the astronauts captured a perfect shot of Earth, fragile and alone in the infinite cosmos. The Blue Marble photo is one of the most shared photographs of all time. Yet despite Cernan’s plea that “we shall return”, Apollo 17 was the last time someone was far enough away to capture planet Earth in a single frame… at least for now.
MISSION TIMELINE
7 Dec 02:53
Launch held at T-30 seconds due to a pressurisation issue with an oxygen tank
7 Dec 05:33
Mission launches
7 Dec 08:51
Translunar injection propels Apollo 17 towards the Moon
10 Dec 19:53
Crew arrive in lunar orbit
11 Dec 17:20
Lunar module separates from command module and descends towards surface
11 Dec 19:54
Lunar module touches down on lunar surface
11 Dec 23:54
EVA 1 begins, lasting 7 hours, 11 minutes, 53 seconds
12 Dec 23:28
EVA 2 begins, lasting 7 hours, 36 minutes and 56 seconds
13 Dec 22:25
EVA 3 begins, lasting 7 hours, 15 minutes, 8 seconds
14 Dec 22:54
Lunar module relaunches
15 Dec 01:10
Lunar module redocks with command module, reuniting the crew
16 Dec 23:35
Trans-Earth injection propels spacecraft towards home
19 Dec 19:24
Splashdown
*All times are UT
