Why We Haven't Gone Back To The Moon? (Space Race Documentary) | Spark

the saturn v rocket that would carry the crew of apollo 17 to the moon inched its way to the launch pad as last minute preparations were being made for the final lunar flight of the apollo program [Music] the five successful moon landings of preceded apollo 17 were all crewed by test pilot astronauts trained in science apollo 17 was to be the last opportunity for a true scientist to set foot on the lunar surface apollo 17 is the story of humanity's need to understand its place in the universe for the first time this program presents the recollections of this historic mission as told by all three of the crew members as well as their thoughts on the future of humanity in space we had gone to the moon and uh and returned to a three country and within the nixon administration and within congress uh the political uh center of mass just began to shift away from the cold war from the other kinds of things let's get out of vietnam it was big issue at the time most if not all of my colleagues during the apollo program did not imagined that we would throw away the capabilities that we had developed to go to the moon and to do other things in space as rapidly as we did we had planned through apollo 20. we had the hardware to do it and we had the people in place to lay the plans necessary to do those things and as we got near the end of apollo i mean maybe in the middle of apollo i think that nasa management recognized that they needed a portion of the nasa effort to start doing other things and so i think they evaluated that in their mind they talked with the scientists and compromised between what people wanted done on apollo as opposed to what people wanted in other places in the in the solar system indeed uh my the mission that i was originally in line for apollo 18 had been cancelled uh uh during the uh apollo 15 training cycle and so uh from the point of view of many of the astronauts and and the handwriting was on the wall that the apollo program was was indeed winding down that apollo 15 16 and 17 would be the last intensive scientific effort to explore the moon for the foreseeable future and we were all well aware of that i thought nobody got everything they wanted but i think most people got a reasonable compromise people were very unhappy when we didn't fly more it was 18 19 and 20 in the science community and rightfully so we had the hardware to do it we just didn't have the resources to do it my presence on apollo 17 was a consequence of media pressure i think on nasa a feeling by many of the managers of nasa that indeed we should not terminate the apollo program without putting a scientist on the moon and once that decision had been made it was also clear that uh that the taurus electoral valley was an extremely uh challenging geological site and would not only tax my capabilities but those of anyone else that might have flown we hope that geologically speaking we'll be able to uncover rock types and different types of geologic finds that date back from the very beginning of the moon moon's history to the to the present time and of course the major objective here scientifically is to be better better able to understand our own earth our own evolution of of life as our earth knows it our own environment and maybe better predict what has happened and what might happen in the future concerning civilization here on earth [Music] obviously i'm enthusiastic about the total potential of the site to look into the two major questions that is understanding the earth better through the moon and its early history and understanding the sun better through the exposure of its soils to the sun and then of course there's this other thing of the unexpected and who knows what that's going to be and that's really what makes it exciting the toughest job decade was taking somebody off of apollo 17 and putting jack schmidt on because uh uh he was just flat out told that he had to fly a geologist on that last flight i think again i think that was the right thing to do but it's a tough thing to do as a manager of astronauts and you have one guy already assigned and you have to take them off and put somebody else on but i think it turned out to be absolutely the right thing to do and i think that's what space like today ought to be all about putting the scientists up there to let him do his thing i joined the apollo program to go to the moon to help train astronauts and to do something that i thought was extremely important for the country as well as the science and this gave me an opportunity to to put my life work where my mouth was and indeed i i don't have any regrets about what the way it played out and what we were able to do on apollo [Music] 17. [Music] and then you go on out and you get inside of the spacecraft and then they do a few checkouts and a few things like that and they close a hat and then you have a chance to kind of sit there and start thinking here i am on top of a rocket that's as tall as a 36 story building and down inside that rocket there is four and a half million pounds of liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen and kerosene i'll tell you what if your heart doesn't go pretty fast just a little bit faster than normal you don't understand the potential problem during launch there's really very little they can do except for just strap in and write it you know so uh it was very nervous making for them i mean like their the heart rate that they monitored in mission control i mean like almost invariably showed higher heart rate during launch and in any other portion of the flight including when they would land on the moon because when they're landing they're driving it you know when they're blasting off they're just sitting there and they were as scared as they ever got your eyes now past the one-minute mark and we are going on internal power now all systems to internal power we'll be looking for the engine start sequence at the 8.9 second mark in the countdown the engines will build up to a trust of 7.6 million pounds t-minus 30 seconds we have a cut-off we have a cutoff at t-minus 30 seconds we're standing by at t-minus 30-second mark we'll bring word to you uh just as soon as we get it we have a cut off at t minus 30 seconds the problem turned out to be a a launch computer wiring problem these hardware problems where the one of the oxygen tanks had not pressurized in response to a signal from the launch computer it in fact the signal was not sent somebody saw that the tank had not pressurized and they manually pressurized so we were ready to go we could have gone uh but the computer didn't know that taken by the crew aboard the space vehicle now approaching the half minute mark you probably took most of the time it's nasa management indeed they knew the problem they fixed it now we're ready to go within uh two hours and 40 minutes we were on our way and then final guidance release we'll expect engine ignition at 8.9 seconds 10 9 8 7 ignition sequence started all engines are started we have ignition two one zero we have a liftoff we have a liftoff and it's lighting up the area it's just like daylight here at kennedy space center as the saturn v is moving off the pad horizon was it was like the universe lit up from without all the fish and all the everything that was in a pond apparently at that point in time just leaped out of the water instantaneously when the light came across and then of course then that rumbling saturn five times uh a second later came roaring across the crowd and let me tell you it was a roar inside i i could literally see uh through the only window we had the reflection of that tremendous amount of effective sunlight as i look straight up out the window and then the old rocket starts going up in the air and accelerating and it's shaking shaking and vibrating and banging away you know and then you're going faster and faster and faster and as it accelerates and they're just still shaking and then it starts pushing you back into the seat until two minutes and 10 seconds into the flight you've got four and a half g's or four and a half times your weight pushing you back down into the seat and shaking them back and back standing quick [Music] but then the first stage drops off and then the second stage ignite and again you have five big rocket engines on there but you're above most of the earth's atmosphere and all the vibration and shaking spots and there's a nice smooth ride guys i've got the words oh i i do not remember any problems in earth orbit as far as i can recall uh everything was checking out beautifully we did our uh two orbits reignited the s4b the third stage of the saturn v over australia and uh accelerated from 18 000 miles an hour to 25 000 miles an hour in a perfect burn and we were on our way we hardly needed any in fact we didn't need any mid-course corrections all the way out when you get to this point uh you realize that something strange has happened this is a strange and yet familiar sight and horizon then bends around upon itself and closes in upon itself and this is where you begin to see sunrises and sunsets happening before your very eyes rather than flying through them as you do an earth orbit when you're leaving that earth at 25 000 miles an hour within just 20 minutes that relatively flat earth transitions down to a little ball that you can see afterward eight inches ago man oh man what a sight that is [Music] our next tax of course was to pick up the lunar module from its uh storage place in the end of the saturn v and that went without a hitch ron flew a perfect uh docking maneuver with it i remember uh after we were on our way in apollo 17 the mission control said you're on your way uh you're right on target as it should have been we had little or no problem the problems are what the problems were all taken up by the time we got to apollo 17 the only problems we had were the fact that ron evans lost the scissors and without your scissors in space you can't eat you can't you can't you can do little or nothing and that was probably the major problem we had ron evans was on watch that third day third night and they couldn't wake him up he was a very deep sleeper they tried everything and we didn't realize what had happened until i had rolled over or rotated in my sleeping bag and saw that the master alarm light was on the ground had put it on they couldn't turn it off and i reached up just to turn it off and then to begin to find out what was wrong and it was very very hot so it obviously had been on for some time and that's when we started to wake up and realize ron was over there snoring away and totally oblivious we had to shake him to wake him up and we're gonna we're gonna head out to some place we can't see we were landing in the very eastern edge of the moon therefore it was not lit uh when we when we started it was like a new moon so we really couldn't see where we were going and we were headed out at 25 miles 25 000 miles an hour to rendezvous with a target we couldn't see three days later uh and we were we were going to miss it by 50 miles and i just fall back i said he said you're good you're right on target you're going to miss the moon by 50 miles and i said god i hope you're right 89 hours 15 minutes ground elapsed time i'm 55 seconds until apollo 17 comes from behind the moon on the start of the first loader orbit the ignition time was 88 54 21 and ground elapsed time on this particular case you go by the side of the moon and you light the engine off and and if the engine burns too long that means you slow down too much you go out along the side of the moon and it goes it's black side of the moon not too good for the astronaut or if you're going along the side of the moon the engine fires but it doesn't fire long enough then it slows you down a little bit but not enough and you go uh skipping off into space a little bit of curve but you're going that way and there's back over here not too good again so you burn the engine exactly right and you end up going to into an orbit around the moon craters our craters are craters and there are nothing but craters on the moon some of them are several thousand feet big and some of them are several inches and when you're coming down on the moon to land you can't tell how big that crater is you know whether it's a hundred feet ten feet two feet because you don't have any reference [Music] that's the reason we wanted the sun angle we wanted because if you get the sun angle right then you get some definition you get some some depth perception [Applause] are we coming in pictures proceeded [Music] we landed in a valley not a large valley but the valley of tourist little northeastern edge of the moon we had to launch at night by the way in the month of december in 1972 in order to get the shadows where we wanted them uh during landing that valley was a valley about 20 miles across surrounded by mountains that were higher than the grand canyon of arizona's deep so when we pitched over 7 000 feet i think i made a comment at that time again that we were really down among them and you really were because all of a sudden you could see these mountains right out of your peripheral vision on the sides of the mountains and that's when that's when that dream of yours began to begin to become a reality that's when you really realized what was happening where you were headed [Applause] [Music] badger janja that's superb you can tell america that challenger is a tourist literal as i step off at the surface that tourist literally i'd like to dedicate the first step of apollo 17 to all those who made it possible that's what it looks like it's waving in a breeze how about right there i got a beautiful picture you guys up down there let me tell you bob this flag is a beautiful picture he's been uh beautiful it's gotta be one of the most proud moments of my life i guarantee you the uh apollo 17 science plan uh included in the first day a deployment of a much more complicated uh science package or alcept than any of the other missions we had a new set of experiments they some of them were fairly complicated in the deployment we again had the heat flow drilling to do as well as to get some cores from those heat flow drill holes and we had some problems particularly with what was called a long period gravimeter uh that our gravity meter that was a special experiment designed to sense gravity waves if they came by and excited the moon's free oscillation that one did not was not properly designed put together and we didn't know it at the time so we spent a lot of a lot of time a lot of our first dvd time trying to get that to engage if i can't crash the corner and get that contact or size on a surface moon you have nothing relatively to to judge uh distance by except the lunar module itself and when you take that rover and you drive 15 or 20 uh kilometers away and go over the hills and around the bend it's very difficult to find it in the first place much less use it to judge a distance of sign there's nothing on the moon you know there is no way to tell how far away anything is i mean everybody had an incredibly difficult time finding their way around later on when they were taking the rover out there they were getting lost you know i mean like they had to be very careful about where they were going because uh they couldn't tell you know you can't look around plus the place is small the moon's a lot smaller you know to where like the angle you know i mean like the horizon is much closer so it's just a hard place to find your way around i would think you know i can imagine getting lost [Music] well don't move until i see it [Applause] it's all over orange hey it is [Music] [Applause] [Music] in terms of productivity where we followed the plan that we had very very closely we were able to deviate from the plan because we kept building up some reserves of time until we hit station 4 where we found the orange soil that was unexpected of course as as our most discoveries and we immediately went to work even without waiting for the ground to figure out what we ought to do because we knew what we had to do and we in half an hour we probably had the most productive uh 30 minutes of any apollo mission sampling and gaining the information necessary to really understand that orange soil oh man that's incredible okay gene we're going to have to that's it scientists were looking for the oldest rock that they could possibly get back from the universe because they wanted to date the place as well as the rocks being a sort of a history of what's happened to the to the moon during its geology it turns out it came from very deep within the moon probably as deep as 500 kilometers has given us insights into the evolution of the moon as a small planet as well as i think tells us whether or not the moon was captured or uh was derived by a mars-sized impact on the earth indeed i think it tells us [Music] about three centimeters they gotta leave at a certain time regardless of what we got willing to give up all the light man and stuff i mean every astronaut you sent up there wanted to extend the time i'd do an eva or extend the time on the lunar surface or extend the time running some tests that's the that's the perfected perfectionist in all of them i think they wanted to do it better and better and better or to get more and more data that would do the job better [Applause] molly why are we out of slope okay man that's rough country in there well you're looking all geologists like to go to areas that have never been explored we try to do that as a young geologist on earth all the time if you can't go to an area that's never been explored before you go to a problem nobody's ever worked on before that's just the excitement of science that's what you always try to do nobody's been able to top my field area and it'll be some time before they do i i suspect until a geologist paleontologist gets out on the surface of mars and begins to search for those fossils that i'm almost certain they're there they they won't have a chance to top what we did on apollo 5. i remember one of the questions i got asked by the press uh over and over again they'd always say well are these the best astronauts you've ever had flying how do they compare with the guys again before and i would always answer that saying the two guys we get up there the best we've ever flown because they've learned from all of the mistakes of everybody else they learn from the experiences from everybody else and therefore they are bound to be the best frame and the best and i think that is the true statement i have the privilege of being the only guy to have a wreck quarter million miles away from the nearest car i knocked the back part of that fender off and uh we lost it somewhere well i guess i did bring it back i think it's in the smithsonian now we did find it but we couldn't put it back on and the lunar dust was a tremendous problem the dust would come up over the top and we tried to drive without defender and it was like driving a dust room we had to someway build a fender to keep that dust uh from coming over on us and on all of our equipment john devised this uh defender uh here here on earth and passed the word up and we used a couple uh a couple camera clips we had and i be honest with you being an aviator first in the geology second i found no better use to do geology maps the third eba and third excursion took us over to the big boulder at station six spectacular shots still footage was taken as well as some movie footage and uh there we learned even more about the uh enormous amount of energy that's involved in the formation of these large basins we were at the rim of the terenatados basin 500 kilometers in diameter tremendous energy melting of rocks and things like that and that big boulder was a good type example of what happens when these immense collisions occur it's a rock composed of many fragments of many sizes in many shapes when we return this rock or some of the others like it to houston we'd like to share a piece of this rock with so many of the countries throughout the world we hope that this will be a symbol of what our feelings are with the feelings of the apollo program are and the symbol of mankind that we can live in peace and harmony in the future as a very articulate man and and uh and was the absolute right person to be the last man on the moon you know because like he really closed it off well you know i mean uh he he he said good things he did good things he has good smart memories you know i mean like he speaks well of the entire expedition not just his flight you know i mean he was a good person to have been the last man on the moon [Applause] of what the real meaning of apollo is [Laughter] many times over the last three days and i'll read what that flag says to you the words are here completed december 1972 a.d of all mankind nasa was very safety conscious every system was double redundant they had three of something you know i mean but they only had one engine to take off and so they made the simplest engine they could build you know i mean it was a very simple and straightforward engine and you turned it off and it went on hopefully capcom econ gnc guidance you happy [Music] [Music] i want to get something squared away very very quickly no one will ever forget and of course we've been reminded over and over again uh neil's first word on the surface of the moon but not many people remember man's last word on the surface of the moon uh just in case any of you played trivial pursuits so you do have the right answer i'm going to give you those words right now we were sitting in a lunar module about 20 seconds before liftoff and i looked over attack and i said jack let's get this mother out of here three two one [Applause] houston we'd like to terminate asset feed now [Applause] your trajectory is right on the money both systems are go a normal shutdown and normal trim procedures [Applause] roger normal shut down normal trim looks like you've been flying well up there partner the spacecraft looks good oh command module pilot is the one who's basically in charge the learner module is passive and the guy comes in and docks with them and takes them home and that's a very difficult rendezvous and document and the the two pilots of the two ships have to know each other pretty well [Music] lost [Music] jack schmidt who uh defended her wanted to be a comedian a number of times uh when we opened our hatch going to lunar module ron ron's hat wasn't open and and uh jack had something up his sleeve and was one up by ron because he just went knock knock knock of course we were talking to each other's through tom he went knock knock knock and not evan says who's there and when you open the hatch you know those guys have been down there walling around in that very very fine lunar dust and and when they opened the hatch this dust just kind of flowed or filtered infiltrated my nice clean spacecraft there were always rocks and everything else came across there and man were they [Music] dirty hey this is great talk about being a space man this is it the eva is primarily designed first of all to retrieve the film that's back in the sim bay the two cameras the pan camera and the mapping camera of course have film cassette the lunar sounder its basic information is recorded on film these cassettes are in the sim bay and of course the only piece of the whole booster that comes back into the earth's atmosphere it lands is only that little command module up on the top so somehow we've got to get the film cassettes back into the command module and that's the purpose of the epa and when i was coming back in the the third time as i mentioned they finally looked down and we just leave right there with some signing on the spacecraft painted down there below the hat was an american's life and below that flag it said again painted in there united states of america to not help the cause reflect the moment that your nation my nation through our endeavors and accomplishments in space for that very time created and unprecedented prestige in the eyes of the rest of the world [Music] [Music] so you come in exactly six degrees down and and and you come in six degrees down and then when you get down to three hundred thousand feet above the earth that's when you start feeling the friction in the atmosphere and i have a little g-meter inside the fish trap and it reads 0.05 500 that's the signal hey gene hang on something's going to happen and does it ever very very rapidly from five hundredths of a g in just 35 seconds time you've got seven g's pushing you back down and the seat on the spacecraft you know it starts pushing you back down in there and then the spacecraft due to this aerodynamic friction whatever it starts to skip back out into space so before it goes from seven g's back up to four g's you gotta turn it upside down make it dig back into the earth's atmosphere so come on down come on man come on down then you have four g's and then down to three g's and then down to two g's then one g and it starts to tumble and flop around and then you get down to twenty five thousand feet boom i don't parachute [Music] [Music] the only thing we've got left to do now is to hit the water so as we i had an altimeter in the spacecraft and as you get close to the water i started crawling off uh the altitude then we got down to 500 feet 400 feet 300 feet we hit the water altimeter is wrong [Music] one aspect for young people to remember to follow is that there were about 450 000 individuals involved i don't know of any single one of those individuals not believe that what they were doing at that time was the most important thing they could do with their lives as a consequence you did indeed get 16 18-hour days eight day weeks out of these individuals and they uh they did it willingly what is the one thing the one thing in the last decade that has increased the esteem of our nation the united states in the eyes of the rest of the world the one thing has been our participation in the space program the whole world looks to the united states to lead to go their accomplishments in the space program and to me that's a very very important thing [Music] so all in all uh the politicians scientifically extraordinarily conducted uh it added the most samples to any that any mission we collected 250 pounds to the 600 pounds that had been collected by previous missions uh and uh from those samples and the all the missions put together we indeed developed the first order understanding of the moon as a planet and it's history as a small planet something that is no mean accomplishment for a program even the size of apollo what really matters about apollo is those were the first people to leave the earth to go anywhere you know in the next 500 years if we don't destroy ourselves who knows where we'll go you know i mean there's a whole universe out there waiting for us but that was the first time human beings left the earth and historically i think that's the way history is going to look back at these flights is not that they landed on the moon but that they left the earth some historian will probably try to put together a story that apollo particularly early years of apollo had a great deal to do with this country surviving the experience of vietnam in that it did offer something positive on the evening news at a time when almost everything else was negative and it wasn't just vietnam the civil rights crisis uh crises that were occurring in the nation it was a very traumatic time politically and sociologically for the united states of america as well as the world and paula was indeed a very positive uh as well as a very exciting thing happening that served to dilute the impact of those otherwise traumatic events i think i feel very strong about that have written and spoken about it and i think actual historians will will discover that back sometime [Music] i think we contributed a great deal to the outlook of the country and there's no question we contributed tremendously to the technical technological advantage that the country had in the 70s based on the technology we developed in the 60s i mean just the communication satellite by itself has changed the whole face of the earth in a very very short time the world is no longer anywhere near the same place as well and now look at the computer the computer is unbelievable materials unbelievable the ability of doctors to determine what's going on in the body through instrumentation all had its nucleus in the space program i don't see exploring space as ignoring earthly problems so much as it's a it's a different way to grow you know we have to grow our way out of our problems and that's a very serious way to grow you know you learn a lot doing it you learn a lot about yourself doing it you learn a lot about the planet you just left you know and uh and i think that's important it can all be useful to the growing experience of the human race um i think if we don't self-destruct that we're gonna go out there you know i mean it's the nature of evolution to explore wherever you can i mean to where like every life form spreads its territory as far as it can you know and the human race is the first earthly life form that's been able to go anywhere else it was very risky very difficult very expensive to go to the moon the way we did in the problem and i think the next time we go we want it to be not as risky you want it to be not as costly you want it to be the risk to be very very limited in terms of safety and we want to be able to stay there a long time take advantage of the people we send because i'm sure we'll send a bunch of scientists as well as astronauts there what apollo has done has taken men from the environment in which they evolved to put them in an environment that is is orders of magnitude different than any environment that life has ever that we know of has ever existed and this has to be considered an evolutionary step [Music] i think it's that mankind will continue that evolution will continue to explore and challenge himself on this first frontier and we're going to start to do what was done in the days of the west after the mountain men and after the army explorers we're starting to put the farmers and the miners the practical utilizers of space into space that if you're going to live off the planet earth permanently you cannot always import your life materials from the earth you must learn to live off the land in the same way that the pioneers who expanded westward lived off the land that implies you must learn to use resources in space and planets are the place where there are resources so then the question is what are the resources and how do you use them and the moon is not a particularly good place for resources it lacks a lot of the things that we take for granted for sustenance of life such as the life-giving elements we explored a planet not many people get a chance to do that there were places left to go many things left unlearned uh but nevertheless we now know so much more about the early history of the earth the early history of the solar system than we would have had we never gone that it has changed our approach to all other space missions and in our interpretation to the data that comes from all other spaces apollo has nothing to hang his head about scientifically apollo indeed there was an exploration program that could only have been done by human beings it could only achieve its political goals by having human beings there and in fact it could only have achieved its scientific return by having human beings there we did become a little bit more philosophical as we uh who ended the apollo program it was a major challenge and it was a challenge and a commitment that the president gave us a number of years earlier we will not rest on our laurels of having gone to the moon but we will lead all of mankind into the future and i truly believe that that is our destiny [Music] the apollo 17 mission commander captain gene cernan left nasa shortly after its flight and became a network news consultant on space issues he is now a very successful businessman based in houston texas [Music] command module pilot captain ron evans stayed with nasa for a brief time and was the backup command module pilot for the apollo soyuz test flight in 1975. he left nasa in 1977 to enter the private sector of the aerospace industry near phoenix arizona sadly he died of a heart attack at the age of 56 on april 6 1990. [Music] lunar module pilot dr harrison schmidt also stayed with nasa for a brief time assisting scientists with skylab experiments then returned to his home state of new mexico and entered politics he became a united states senator in the late 1970s and early 1980s based in albuquerque new mexico he is now a consultant for several corporations working towards the goal of colonizing the moon to mine helium-3 to the lunar surface a vast source of energy that may someday be used extensively from fusion reactors on earth

Channel: Spark

Views: 195,650

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary, apollo 17 launch, apollo 17 documentary, apollo 17 lunar liftoff, moon landing, space travel, man on the moon, apollo 17, space program, space race

Id: GR6TIs935kk

Length: 48min 2sec (2882 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020