friends tonight marking the tenth anniversary of the first moon landing James Burke looks back at project Apollo and the men who walked on the moon CDR panel 325 primary glycol to rant valve pulled bypass ignition sequence starts six [Music] [Music] I don't like that one at the time during the flight exciting fortune trajectory was the descent to the lunar surface was the most demanding the systems were the most heavily loaded there were the largest number of unknowns things were being taxed to the limit and it was most challenging from a personal standpoint that is the moment when the lunar module pitches forward from it's basically Aiza back down attitude and you view the surface out the window directly for the first time and realized that after having gone a quarter of a million miles you are in fact within a kilometer of the objective that you are in the control you are going to be able to land it because you've been at thousands of times I'll never forget that moment there's absolutely no question about it bland color stark there's no trees there's very difficult it's like beam it's like being in a sharply defined chart okay we did but nificant I use the word majestic it had a majestic beauty [Music] [Music] ten years ago apollo reached its climax with a landing on the moon it was a kind of tremendous enterprise that will very probably not happen again in our lifetime this program is a celebration of that enterprise [Music] 12 men succeeded and two failed in attempting to reach the lunar surface on board their tiny spaceship the fragile glittering machine known as the lunar module the left [Music] [Applause] [Music] father [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the last Apollo started home on the 19th of December 1972 only two and a half years after manned lunar exploration had begun today much of the talent and expertise that made Apollo possible is dispersed throughout America most of the astronauts to have left Neil Armstrong for instance and Buzz Aldrin his fellow crew man on the first landing Armstrong is now a professor of aeronautical engineering at Cincinnati University where he retired in 1971 away from public gaze except for a brief appearance in Chrysler commercials Buzz Aldrin with an engineering consultancy in Los Angeles suffers from bouts of alcoholic depression Pete Conrad works for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft and does advertisements for one of their subcontracting companies our bean still with NASA training astronauts for the shuttle Admiral al Shepard was a millionaire while still an astronaut now sells beer ed Mitchell experiments with telepathy and runs a business Jim Irwin got religion on his flight and is now an evangelist John young still with NASA chief astronaut and commander of the first shuttle Dave Scott is a high-technology consultant with his own business the Charlie Duke sells property in a small town in Central Texas gene cernan's the vice president of an oil company and Jack Schmidt the only geologist to fly to the moon is now actively lobbying for space as a u.s. senator these last four men together with two other key men in Apollo Jim Lovell commander of the only flight that failed to get there and ex astronaut and administrator Jim McDivitt got together in a Houston hotel specially for this program and I asked them about the image NASA projected of them in the old days most people who come up to you said gee it's really nice to know that that you're just an average guy you know that you put your pants on one leg at a time because the first off you you go into a meeting or an audience and they expect you to float in in your spacesuit and land on the stage and when you especially a young kids and if you don't do that it's almost boo hiss get off the stage you're a fake don't you do that every time no I've tried to collected the all-american boy image clean-cut and and I think at the time it was necessary I mean it was to show it a new hero worship and in the country at a time when weren't you that image I faked it it brought some new hero worship at a time I think this country needed it look at the period that's an excellent point look at the period in which all this was happening the late sixties and early seventies cryin out loud look at what else was happening there's Vietnam there was a student problems on the campuses and a lot of other things were really the major Ponzi thing happening in this country and maybe in the world was space rarely if ever has any group of individuals captured the public imagination more than did these men at least up until public interest began to wane after the first landing they were as Jim Lovell said portrayed as clean-living all-american boys but there was always a touch of the Superman about them true back in December 1958 if you had wanted to be an astronaut theorist and simple basic requirements aged between 25 and 40 and a 5 foot 11 it was gonna be a small spacecraft science degree qualifications qualified jet test pilot healthy experience in dangerous and stressful situations they were thinking of people like balloonist Arctic explorers mountain climbers and such but the White House was thinking of national security and said you stick to the military but you might still have qualified let me go on the selectors also said that they were looking for high intelligence ability to command ability to take orders motivation creativity mathematical abilities sociability adaptability maturity decency psychological stability could you sit absolutely still in a dangerous situation how are you doing so far but then candidates and there were five hundred and eight of them had to go through exhaustive interviews in Washington followed by every known medical test including sperm count at the interestingly named Lovelace clinic in Albuquerque New Mexico well that cut them down to 31 and then it was off to secret midnight rendezvous in groups of five in Dayton Ohio for what was known as stress testing now what I looked past back on it it was very idiotic some of the tests were still being devised as we went through the rollin you around and all sorts of directions anybody would get sick they also dropped them spun them heated them tilted them made them run on treadmills and vibrated them until they indicated that they'd had enough at which point they took them off to further forms of torture the your foot was in a bucket of ice water there was a flash of light in your eye very painful he spent ten hours in a darkened room some of the stuff today we realise was unnecessary I I think though that the doctors didn't know what the people would get into in space and so they were trying to make sure that whoever they selected was immune to just about anything and all the time the psychiatrists were saying things like please give twenty answers to the question for grammar could you have done that never mind the rest well they had a very in-depth aptitude test things that all aptitude tests have do you love your mother and things of this nature oh the Rorschach test you recall those we look at ink blots and what are what do you see there well in our second selection of the GEMA deprogram al shivered sort of warned us about this he said now be sure that you give the proper answers because make sure that you are masculine ufff otherwise you be eliminated from the program but of course he was saying this in tongue-in-cheek but we all took him seriously so when all the ink blots came up we we looked at him and sure enough we'd always see some feminine Anatomy in there to make sure that we gave the proper sexual response yeah what none of our seven new heroes realized was that anybody who failed any test for psychological reasons however slight would have been out well as somebody said at the time once you've chosen your supermen that only leaves you about 10,000 other problems to solve let's take a look at some of the major ones not least how you get men to the moon the trouble with that is what goes up tends to come down now at the time they were doing a bigger version of that with intercontinental ballistic missiles which is why they thought they could go to the moon at all all they had to do is to stop the rocket falling back to earth and that's where the idea of an orbit comes in if you fire with sufficient power the rocket will come down halfway across the world but at an angle reach a speed of over 17,000 miles an hour and the rocket will fall but missed the earth and go on missing it like this next you boost your speed to over 25,000 miles an hour and the rocket will follow a new orbit still trying to fall to earth but going out over 250,000 miles into space before doing so like this if the rocket intercepted at this point by the moon then the moon's gravitational field will attract the rocket just enough to change its orbit swing it around the back of the moon and head to earth a touch on the brake pedal as it were at the right moment and you've stay in orbit around the moon another touch and you'll and all you have to have to be able to do that he's one of these a Saturn five and that is your next major problem how do you build one of these monsters safe enough and accurate enough to risk putting men on top and shooting them at the moon well the answer to that question is that you give it to many different people to each build and test one part the figures on the Saturn 5 were astronomical this first stage made by Boeing carried five hundred and thirty thousand gallons of fuel and accelerated to six thousand miles an hour in two and a half minutes Stage two built by North American Aviation increased the speed to over 15,000 miles an hour and went up to 600,000 feet [Music] the third-stage built by McDonnell Douglas would eventually take a speed up to 25,000 miles an hour escape velocity with the housing for the Lunar Module the mother spacecraft and the launch escape tower the whole stack reached a mind-boggling 363 feet end-to-end the secret of seven success was to test fly everything at once something of a gamble when you think how hard it was to guide even the small early rockets and by Apollo time the engines were bigger and the rocket bodies themselves made of much thinner metal launch had to be absolutely right if there's the slightest wobble the speed simply tears the thing apart like this von braun solved the wobble problem by the hair-raising expedient of giving saturn the ability to change its direction of thrust because the five one and a half million pound thrust engines were actually usable that moment of liftoff the things are just starting you've got all your pumps so you've got that large thrust buildup you've got this really birth going on at that times the moment of birth because the space vehicle comes to life and lifts off it's on its own Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie do calls riding Saturn through separation the train crash and then issue accelerated up to shut down you were four and a half G's pushing you back into the seat and then the engines won't they shut down instantly and bang it felt like the thing came apart in it it long like that and everything flew up and the cloud came by the window of the spacecraft and to me that was that that was the train wreck [Applause] so the next problem getting a big enough push to go to the moon was soft-launched worth hairy but never during the event itself it's a bit like an operating table you don't want the surgeon ever getting mad - Ellie's running the operation but after the operation I'll say there was a woodshed back the fellows call that Rocco's woodshed that we did go to occasionally and have a few words but not in the firm next problem how you get the crew to the moon and back was solved by this the command module with a cylindrical service module behind it take a look around come on module rather small for three men for nearly ten days isn't it three couches with the one in the middle usually folded away for extra space you flew the spacecraft is that here in this control how much power do you want and with this one which way do you want to go ahead of you the control panel which way up are you computer engines fuel tanks and up here the warning lights so here you are in your spacecraft but where it's here that's the next major problem navigation most of the time the big tracking stations on the earth would work out how long it took a radio signal to get back to them from the spacecraft and use that information to work out whereabouts in space the Apollo was but in here if anything goes wrong you're on your own and that's where this comes in see how a gyro stays the same way up whatever else moves now you put three gyros spinning and sitting still like that like that and like that and they will sense the spacecraft moving around them and tell the computer and so will three accelerometers that sense thrust like the way you know your head jerks back when a car accelerates now the computers got a clock so it knows we're going in this direction we're going this fast in this direction and we've been doing it for X hours or minutes and it can use that to work out where the spacecraft is roughly for the really fine detail you use these things a telescope and a sextant you point the spacecraft so that through the sextant do you see say Miami then you ask the computer to find you a particular star and as its hunting for the star with the telescope it also tilts a little mirror back on the sextant at the same time okay here's this star in the telescope center it up when you go back to the sextant the stars also in the sextant tilted mirror and because of the optics its superimposed on Miami the angle of the sextons little mirror is the angle between the star and Miami put that angle into the computer so you've got this angle do it again to another star and Miami now there are several places in space where you'd get those particular angle relationships but since the computer already knows approximately where you are it knows which of those positions you're not at leaving only the one you are at and that's how you get a fix in space looks easy urine blobs look like stars which is why position remarks like the following one are so vain that was a voice of Jim Lovell onboard Apollo 8 together with commander Frank Borman and lunar module pilot Bill Anders on their historic first flight out to the moon in December 1968 the first time men had crossed the frightening airless void between the planets and look back at the fragile beauty of Mother Earth on Christmas Eve they reached the moon we've got its Apollo 8 now and in lunar orbit there's a cheer in there at this room [Music] I know my own brand [Music] Jim Lovells work on Apollo 8 made navigation that bit easier for the flights that followed although as he himself says the things went so well he nearly blew the mission one day on the way home after we had gone around the moon and we're sort of relaxed I got a little careless and I started to use the program to start navigating and I accidentally put in the wrong program which actually put me back on the launch pad I lost all reference of our position in space our attitude this was not to be in the plan of the flight they you know we were we wanted to keep everything going this was the very first flight and naturally we didn't want to lose our reference because we could not make that safe entry back home again and so everybody was quite concerned until I manually looked around the sky and found three stars that I recognized since the computer could not tell me any longer what star was which and I then did a manual alignment of the platform and from then up we were back in good shape again the next problem to solve was this how the lunar module coming up from the moon's surface would find the command module after a 60 mile ascent and go through the complex maneuvers of matching position and speed accurately enough to make this last movement which is speeded up on the film with the kind of precision needed to hit the docking target dead-on this is why that's not at all as easy as it looks suppose you're in the lunar module trailing the command module at the same speed in the same orbit to catch him up you fire your engine wrong that puts you into a higher orbit at him and higher orbits are slower orbits perversely you should have done exactly the opposite fired your engine as if to go directly away from him that drops you into a lower orbit and lower orbits are faster so you catch up as you arrive alongside the command module you are of course below so docking involves a number of very delicate mini maneuvers many of which are the opposite of what you think you should do in march 1969 Jim McDivitt Dave Scott and rusty Schweickart flew Apollo nine in Earth orbit to test for the first time the lunar modules ability to carry out a rendezvous there you go I think I got a handle on it down two months later NASA was ready to try it in lunar orbit Roger Houston Apollo 10 you can tell the world that we have arrived Stafford and Cernan took the lunar module down to 50,000 feet weaving your way up the freeway it was all the way back up that the near disaster occurred the backup auto pilot on board was designed to cut in if the primary system failed to take the ship straight towards a command module from wherever it was as they were on a smooth curving climb towards the mothership that backup system did cut in unexpectedly and the language weren't very untechnical anyway the stamp is set for a light vehicle we'll do it this one okay you ready celebre a Houston they got raping if they had a while yeah right you know but they got it under control over moving just one switch on the guidance control panel in the lunar module like that caused the problem because although the lunar module computer will take you all the way after on if it were all the way down to the surface of the moon by itself it will only do that if all the switches are in the right position so that it's being told what it needs to know and as you can see there are a lot of switches to get in the right position you can of course fly the LEM yourself if you want to using these two controls then the main displays the computer which way up are you how much fuel have you got left and the one everybody wants to see light up very gently that one the lunar contact light as you come in over 500 feet the job is to find somewhere smooth to set down and land on that commander has two minutes to do that before he runs out of fuel so he is looking out of the window as if his life depended on it which it does and the lunar module pilot is telling him all he needs to know from that display there which says you're going forward or sideways at a certain number of feet per second and this display here that says you're going up or down at 70 feet per second so he's calling out things like 200 feet forward a date down at five the name of the game of course is to land on the surface of the Moon going forward or sideways at naught and downwards at a very small number looks easy but as we watch the landing of Apollo 11 remember what I said about getting the switches in the right position let's just stop the landing there for a minute while I tell you about all the other people who were doing it to the people the crew were calling Houston there were about 70 of them and they were split into four shifts their average age was under 30 and this was their office the Mission Operations control room here's what everybody did guide oh the guidance the navigation officer remember him you'll be meeting one Fido every spacecraft maneuver was his responsibility retro bringing him back safely to earth here the flight surgeon here the capsule communicator the astronaut in constant contact with the crew and over here two sets of engineers one set watching all the systems onboard the command module the other watching all the systems onboard the lunar module and everybody watching very carefully up here the hot seat the flight director the boss now while all you and I heard during the mission was the capsule communicator talking to the crew in here everybody was talking to everybody else on their own internal communications network called the flight directors loop listen to what the landing was like on that the flight director in charge whose voice you heard there was Gene Kranz we came on board about eight o'clock in the morning in July 20th and it was sort of like you were all set up for a big game I think everyone had the sweaty palms they were sort of nervous we checked in with the other controllers tomorrow let's get into status of the overall spacecraft and it looked like everything was going great for us and as soon as the spacecraft came over the first thing that we noted was that our communications were very ratty they were poor they were dropping in and out and it seemed that it took that initial problem to sort of mobilize the team to more or less the frame of mind hey this is just another training exercise we got problems that's what we're trained to work on so let's talk about it this is the guidance officer I said you'd meet Steve bales he was monitoring navigation and therefore any navigational involvement on the part of a Polish computer unfortunately we had started the limb guidance computer off with the navigational error it was approximately 14 miles an hour what that means is the guidance computer thinks that it is going toward the moon 14 miles an hour slower than it really is the only thing that could save the situation was an update from the landing radar telling the on-board computer that it was wrong the astronauts could do nothing to help at that point I started to relax a little bit because the worst problem I thought we could ever have in a landing was a navigation problem just 20 seconds after we had started to correct the state vector error first program alarm that means the computer was too overloaded to do everything it was supposed to bales had 20 seconds if in that time the computer stopped navigating or there was one more alarm he'd have to cancel the landing immediately were you scared scared absolutely to death but I was not as scared during alarms as almost but when we started the landing what we had to do is to make sure that if for any reason we would have an accident during the actual landing phase that we had the information to tell us why the accident occurred so the communications and in fact the telemetry were extremely important what you're actually saying is that if people died you had to know why we have to know what that is that is absolutely correct okay we're still got landing radar guides so far I think that conversion was beautiful as it converts yes okay okay I'll flight controller is gonna go for landing retro go I don't know surgeon Joe Capcom work go for landing Joe Houston you're go for landing over 1201 rocket 1201 alarm bobble 1 alarms that type or girls like we're go one of the major problems caused by the five computer emergencies during descent was that the crew were able to look out and see where they were only in the last few minutes so they weren't exactly happy we were certainly aware of some of the problems and it we had a tight field budget we didn't know the computer was gonna act up on us as did the alarms had occurred because a rendezvous radar switch had been left on flooding the computer with an overload of data it didn't even need during the landing ice which was in a place that we told the crew to put it we had not been super smart if we'd have been super smart in the two or three months before the landing and have thought about this circuit and it thought about what the possible implications might be then we'd have caught it pretty beat down to a nap 30 feet doing tamp down or forward into the right level they had 30 seconds of fuel left I'm back right okay engine stop a PA a daddy pen Oh control both autos they've been in command override off for thirteen is in bad shutdown we copy you down eagle everybody in key one stand by a fifty one Vanguard eBay's here the eagle has landed rocket wing tranquility we copy on the ground you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue we're breathing again thanks a lot the eagle has landed and I could see it here on my console I saw the altitude go to zero couldn't believe it we trained I said my god we've made it Charlie Duke at the time says you've got a bunch of guys down here about to turn blue well Charlie Duke could see me from his console position and I've always thought he was talking about me but I always thought he said blue because Charlie couldn't say he's turned white as a sheet which is the way I had turned I assure you deke slayton was director of flight operations at the time and deke was sitting right next to me as we were in the final stages the decent well if they hack didn't get been there during an entire descent in and we were feeding the information back and forth and they got down I think within a couple of hundred feet and within a minute to go and they were still whizzing across the surface and and we were talking and all this information was coming in and I was trying to filter out and finally he kicked me like getting he said shut up so I got quiet and we just watched then and then they started on in and and literally I was holding my breath I can really was and they touched down within 15 seconds of an abort situation or maybe 20 I forgotten exactly but it was close and at that point where the eagle was landed in great we I forgot what I said exactly but we got a bunch of guys about to turn blue we're breathing again and I know I really was and it was so intense at that point but the people up in the viewing room and our training areas you could hear him cheering through the glass walls in the room here and that took a few seconds to sink in and then the thing that we had to do is get back to business again because we had to make sure that we were not only down but we hadn't sprung any leaks in any of our proponents so we had to start a countdown to two possible of work times we had to change the computer modes and every one was was locked up emotionally I remember I was holding on to the in the last minute or so I was holding onto the handle on this TV here and I just didn't let go and I had to change communications loops and I couldn't talk and finally I just got so frustrated with myself but I took gonna hit my hand on the console and it shocked me back to life and for days I was bruised from the wrist all the way to the elbow okay do you want stay no stay a retro surgeon Capcom where's stay perky one just before 4:00 a.m. our time on July the 21st Armstrong climbed down the lunar modules ladder [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] this was the next major problem for the Apollo missions how to survive on the moon the individually tailored spacesuits consisted of helmet and gold tinted visor to protect the eyes a one-piece suit for protection against micro meteorites and a backpack for carrying oxygen and cooling water without a suit on the moon you last less than a second fortunately for NASA everything appeared to work perfect [Applause] pictures of ghosts like astronauts held the entire world in thrall for two hours maybe partly because they were so imperfect they added to the mystery was [Music] everything else seemed to go so well it all looked easy not long after this great day the world became bored by space four months later Apollo 12 did little to help by breaking their TV camera in searing no audience at all for the mission and in April 1971 Apollo 13 lifted off a few people in America bothered to watch over two days into the flight the crew Jim Lovell Fred Hayes and Jack Swigert had just fired the engine to alter their trajectory such that if anything went wrong they could no longer just swing around the moon and come back but what could go wrong the Americans were so blase that the only people watching that nine o'clock in the evening Apollo broadcast where the Houston controller's what nobody knew was that a nervous twitch was in the wrong position and this time it couldn't be fixed by the astronauts even if they've known what was to come [Music] thirteen we've got one more item for you when you get a chance we'd like it to stir up your cryo things okay that request to stir up your cryo tanks was quite reasonable cryo means cryogenic and that refers to the tanks of super cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen they carry onboard to make water and electricity now they'd been having trouble getting a reading on that oxygen tank and they've been getting a low pressure reading on that hydrogen tank and they thought if they stirred up the fans inside the tanks that would stir up the liquid and make it easier to get an accurate reading on the gauges so Jack Swigert sitting here where I am turn the fans on 40 seconds later the spacecraft shook and that light came on and so did the undergo okay stand by there Dean we're looking at it and before we could digest that two more lights came on that said that two out of three of your fuel cells have died which then meant according to our mission rules that we could not land on the moon and there was a wave of disappointment that went through the spacecraft and then for some reason I drifted over to the center of the spacecraft and I looked at the instruments you know the instruments that told me about the two big oxygen tanks in the backend of our spacecraft one quantity gauge was zero and the second one I could actually see go down which normally would never see in a normal flight of course then I begin to get quite worried okay let's everybody think of the kind of things we'd be spinning you can see again anything that looks abnormal in your system negative okay now that's everybody keep cool we got lens still attached let's make sure we don't blow the whole mission that works for the flight flight Network bring me up another computer in the RTCC yeah we got one machine on the RTC scene we've got bills they beat down say okay I want another machine up in the RTCC and I want to point the guys capable of running D logs down there Roger that flight e time go ahead heat up the pressure in o2 tank one is all the way down at 297 well you better think about getting in the lab or using the LEM systems the LEM was their only hope at this point they have just over two hours supply of oxygen for breathing and for power left in the service modules ruptured tanks and nobody yet knew how long the lunar module supply would have to last it would certainly only just be enough go ahead place I want you to get some guys minimum power in the LEM sustain life as the power dropped and the temperature fell back at Houston argument raged about what to do it was too risky to fire the main engine in case it had been damaged by the explosion they would have to go round the moon and come home burning the lunar modules engine and using its navigation systems neither of which had ever been done before levels companions reacted strangely I looked at my two companions and thinking that they were very much anxious to get home too and they both had cameras in their hands and one fella was looking at aperture settings and the other fellow was looking at shutter speeds and I said gentlemen what are your plans we have to get home we're gonna have to speed up our burn and things of this nature and they said well Jim well we're on the back side of the moon we're going to take pictures and I said if we don't get home he won't get him developed and you know they said well you know you've been here before and we haven't your dog goners and we'd like to take some pictures of you don't do show our folks back home and so that's what they did and perhaps some of the finest pictures the backside came out of that that trip around Jim you are go for the bird go for the burn Roger honors for their close with firm guidance okay we're good play control okay we're okay Frank tell me we're go fight ain't go okay we're good fight ground confirms ignition that engine burn had to be done manually the computer wasn't programmed for this situation now they had to set the spacecraft rolling to keep cool in the sunlight and the lunar module had never done that before either as some snatched fitful sleep up came the next bit of bad news the engine burn had completed and placed them on a trajectory aiming for earth but not aiming at it accurately enough to come back to earth alive now that that didn't sound too good either and the ground confirmed that about two hours after we had turned around the moon on our way home they said we have been tracking you and it appears right now that you'll miss the earth the Earth's atmosphere by about fifty six nautical miles somehow Houston had to correct that error while saving fuel and power and still set Apollo 13 up for the last major problem facing every moon flight that of reentry hit the atmosphere too shallow and you skip out like a stone come in too steep and you burn up the entry angle difference between having this happen at 24,000 miles an hour and safety is 2 degrees get it right and you can streaking in like this by the time the flight was entering the atmosphere they've got their audience back once again the world watched Apollo with bated breath if their heat shield had been damaged by the explosion they wouldn't survive after nearly five minutes of agonizing radio silence Apollo 13 made contact they were alive Houston had proved that when faced with an entirely unpredicted situation they could if necessary rewrite the book as they went along however behind all the congratulations and applause NASA was worried the agency couldn't afford to be on the front page for this kind of reason they had to find out why it had happened the entire side of the spacecraft had been blown away and a reconstruction of the events showed how the exploding oxygen tank had ripped the metal like tissue paper why it had exploded turned out to be appallingly simple the tank contained a thermostat switch designed to stop the tank temperature rising too high because nobody realized the tests of voltages had been increased at Cape Kennedy one such test two months before had welded the switch shut five months after Apollo 13 came home NASA had only four more missions left instead of seven thanks to budget cuts and with only four places to go here how do you choose well Apollo 12 had shown that you can land within 500 feet of a target in relative safety and that means you can go into the mountains now the reason you want to go there is because on the moon the mountains are either original surface material undisturbed or their giant bits of stuff thrown out from the interior because of meteor impact or their volcanoes all three of which will tell you something about how old the moon is what it's made of and what's happened during its history so principally for those reasons they decided to go for the last three super scientific missions 15 16 and 17 like this 15 here very high old mountains and rill or valley that might have been formed by flowing lava 16 here deep in the mountains they hoped for evidence of volcanic activity there and 17 the most varied and interesting site of all and the most difficult to get to which is why they kept it to last here they hoped for both evidence of young volcanic activity and very old mountains very mixed sites but in January 1971 the next mission Apollo 14 was targeted here to the fra mauro formation now that looked as if it had originally come from here this giant Basin called Imbrium formed when a gigantic meteorite had struck the moon throwing up material from maybe a hundred miles deep fly out and fall here Apollo 14 landed on that stuff this was what the place looked like touchdown had been perfect with over a minute of fuel left however the commander Al Shepard had landed on what appeared to be a slope and later where the window shades up totally black inside and not sleeping very well as we discussed before some little valve on the air-conditioning system went off and woke both of us up and I whispered at first to Mitchell I said are you awake and he said hell yes I'm awake and I said did you hear that he said hell yes I heard that we discussed it for a while not and we finally said you don't suppose that that thing is tipping over it's sliding down in the dust it's tipping over we know the manufacturer guaranteed it would go to 15 degrees before it fell over but you know maybe manufacture was in the air a few degrees so he both two leaped out of the eye fell on ahead and we suppose scramble for the windows all we would have done I don't know because everything was powered down that particular time and sure enough there at sat at five and a half or six degrees just as serena's could be but we didn't sleep any more that night on 14 second moonwalk they moved away from the LEM towards the hundred foot high cone crater five thousand feet away unfortunately they and their hand cut also moved away passed the camera so all you could do was listen to the steep climb they also couldn't make the rim of the crater [Music] we were looking at with a blank but if it wasn't really the top of it was the real cold their heart rates shot up with the effort and so did the rate they were using oxygen and that takes precedence over all else so they turned back short and headed for the lunar module we didn't bill you know I was in the days when I didn't have I don't bills on the moon way he had to rest a couple more times than we'd figured going up there nothing was discouraging about that also was the fact that the rim of that crater a sharp as it appeared in photographs was really old to our eyes and it was very smooth that we were in fact at the rim although we didn't recognize it and we it's very difficult to judge distances it's very difficult to see there's smooth a minor deviations and minor depressions but that was the only time really that - we had to work awfully hard of course we got a back going downhill because we were really taking a 12-week seven-league steps but I mean I remember you were breathing like hell oh yes fortunately the first of the super scientific missions Apollo 15 was over the moon on July the 29th 1971 with a redesigned spacecraft capable of doing lunar orbital experiments as well as carrying double the previous payload down to the deep twisting valley called Hadley real way down there below them with time running out for Apollo 15s commander Dave Scott was ready to take extra risks once you get that far and that close to your objective there would naturally be times during which you would feel desire to press on when perhaps control center might not I I didn't really find that in my mission although we had just before we landed we did have a couple of short moments with our environmental control system on the lunar module which didn't check out and I can remember thinking to myself well what'll I do because you're so close fortunately I checked out I didn't have to make the decision 15 landed it perhaps the most spectacular Apollo site north of the 12,000 foot Mount Hadley Delta they'd flown over on the way down on their first trip out from the lunar module they ran into trouble drilling holes for the experiment measuring heat flow from the lunar interior they hit hard rock the effort caused Dave Scott to draw blood inside his gloves before giving up setting up all set the surface experiments connected to their central transmitting station that all Apollo's carried took too long thanks to the drilling problem and cut down on the time they had for traveling around and from this flight on those traverses were to be much more ambitious thanks to the fact that they now had their own transport the lunar rover capable of up to seven miles an hour on 15 they were to cover a total of 15 miles on three traverses and everywhere they went the TV camera module on the lunar rover went to on the second Traverse a surprise Genisys Rock Scott called it wrongly hoping it would prove primeval [Applause] after two stops on the rim of the valley they headed back to the lunar module for Houston the first of the new super scientific missions had been a super scientific success then with a feather and a hammer Scott tested Galileo's theory that in a vacuum gravity would cause all objects to fall at the same rate and I'll drop the two up here and hopefully they'll hit the ground at the same time and then came this event that was to end the careers of Scott and his companion Aaron NASA had authorized cancellation of commemorative stamps on the moon but they hadn't authorized were the extra 400 that got done for money back in the lunar module afterwards the NASA image was tarnished although by now people were beginning to realize the astronauts weren't the flawless automata NASA said they were in April 72 when Apollo 16 landed the crew got very expressive about the flatulence caused by a special potassium in orange juice diet taken to protect them from hon young and Charlie Duke had landed in the moon's highlands at a site called Descartes and with only one more flight to go they were picking up every other rock having failed to get the heat flow experiment set up on Apollo 15 because of the drilling difficulties the Houston scientists were pinning their hopes on a more successful attempt to do the same thing here on their first session out after landing when they set up all the experiments they found drilling the hole was a piece of cake and then John Young walked across the heat flow experiments cable ok Baker seven eight Sally what don't app here what happened I don't know Google I they pull those Oh put it there what line is the heat flow pulled it off I don't know how it happened from here I'm waiting my time sorry I didn't know that I didn't even know it copy that broker interconnector why I came up at the connector okay we copy I'll tell my record sorry know what forget direct that he's close [Applause] [Music] [Applause] again the lunar rover took them out on three traverses over terrain much rougher than Apollo 15 on the last run on the rim of a giant crater three miles to the north they came across the biggest rock anybody'd seen so far [Applause] [Music] [Music] and then in December 1972 it was time for the last mission at another landing site in the highlands the first and last qualified geologist to fly Jack Schmitt spent most of his vital few hours on the lunar surface sounding like a man who'd asked for the moon and after three years waiting got it Cernan was the commander of Apollo 17 and this time his heat-flow drill worked both to make holes for the experiment and get tubes full of soil from below the surface as for Jack Schmitt well he was so keen to get as much as possible out of being on the moon he was falling over himself with eagerness [Music] okay what you have which we took over to help Michael close please I don't need any help okay Oh Jack you might worry about whether you might worry about whether your camera is dirtier Queen Jack I know you're doing better are you worried about back then on the way back to the lunar module from their second Traverse they came across something nobody had ever expected to see this until they got back to earth looked like the most extraordinary find of all orange soil might indicate recent volcanic activity or else it was evidence of water on the moon alas neither turned out to be the case but morale was still high as they swung back towards the lunar module at the end of their third Traverse the last Traverse of all for the Apollo missions tell me G&C econ surgeon Henco procedures have failed right we're go for liftoff here captain after 74 hours 59 minutes and 39 seconds on the lunar surface on the 15th of December 1972 the last Apollo lifted off from the moon ending less than three years of exploration watched by the unemotional eye of the TV camera mounted on the lunar it's extraordinary how quickly Apollo and the astronauts have been forgotten when you think of only 12 men in the history of mankind have looked out across scenes like this there's little doubt now that no one in our lifetime will stand again among the desolate mountains of the moon we have decided that there are other more urgent priorities that's why when I met the astronauts in Houston I asked him the question no one who meet an astronaut can resist asking what was it really like to be out there and look back at Earth that's overpowering I think it I don't it didn't I don't really think it changes you it just gives you more philosophical outlook at least it did me to be able to look across the poles and across the continents across the oceans realizing you're really looking at everything you can identify with with homeless people with with humanity with with existence and you can almost spend times with one glance because you can look and watch the Sun Rise on on one part of the the world and almost it said on the other and you're spending times of people and you know without getting religious because it was not a religious experience for me but it did bring back one thing that I feel significant about that the beauty and the logic and the purpose I saw this beautiful beautiful star in the heavens that didn't tumble or roll asleep if it brought back to me something I've probably believed all my life and just really thought about them is it's just too beautiful too perfect to have happened by accident there has to be somebody or something that I don't understand it religion I believe is man-made I happen to believe they all get to the same place that created that small part of the universe that that a few of us were privileged to see to me it was incredibly beautiful and it none of the pictures that we said back or published do it justice it's just jewel what was it I mean what was it like here I go I'm doing it look nobody else but you people spent that much time that close together in that smaller space except people who live in the front seat of a VW I mean what was it like it was a challenge and it was a venture that I think that none of us would ever trade it was it's it's really hard to explain the emotional impact of being around the moon and being there is that you see that's one of the things people go to the Smithsonian or somewhere else or see pictures of the Apollo spacecraft and it does look small yeah but you go weightless in that spacecraft and suddenly it's about double via useful volume because there's there's no floor or ceiling or anything like that and I actually felt I don't know how to do felt but I felt like there were there certain times you could be private you get under the couch and and you're you're essentially alone have you ever felt being private with Frank Borman we we have a relatively sophisticated audience and so I don't feel being I'm being too tacky if I say what does that remind you of time in question that people would like to ask I have Friday you go to the bathroom please could you explain okay well first of all this is of course the end result of a device perhaps one of the most difficult engineering feats that NASA had to face finally I think it was Jim McDivitt flight in four days when they can no longer ignore this problem up to that time they could ignore it but when Jim and Ed white went out for four days obviously they had to do something so it was given to John Young and to do the testing of this they tried early ideas they tried sin typical force that didn't work out too well they tried magnetism in a tube with some sort that didn't work out the iron filings and NASA went through a quite a bit of engineering to finally evolve into this very simple what we call bag now you can imagine and let's set the scene it's five days into Gemini 7 and we're on 14 days and I'm with Frank Borman who's a very regular I have managed a whole Frank wall for five days finally Barney Frank says Jim the time has come and I said Frank we only have nine more days to go I think that you can last a little bit more he says no and so he gets out one of these devices and I look very pleasantly the other direction and there is where we find out that in the space program position is everything in life because if you don't positions this thing correctly we are all in deep trouble now I don't want to go into details on this Jim but you know there's zero gravity in space and so yeah gravity does not help the things work and so nASA has very conveniently put a little finger device in here to help things along now also we've been accused quite a bit of spending too much money in the space program and I want to let you know that we do not do that this is what NASA has provided after everything is done you know I think in the airline industry you call them wet wipes or something like that but I know we are really saving money on this one and finally the Environmental Protection Agency will now allow us to throw anything over the side and so therefore we have to kill all the bacteria otherwise you know three days from now it might have a serious explosion of a spacecraft and so this blue material is is a disinfectant that will kill the bacterium but what you have to do is to mix it thoroughly with the material inside and you can imagine that well you really know if you have a good buddy if you after you're finished you hand it to your your flight mate and say look at a woman did to me that way that oxygen must whatever useful and occasions like that they were admittedly they were used on Apollo 17 see the biggest thing the thing in Jay used when you're lucky to have use it for the face you see Jim were the most difficult part of it was detaching the sticking I did material from the body and and particularly if number two was pretty clothing and that's when you run the risk of number two hitting a fan know what NASA had done I think correctly in their engineering they put a glue on here there was a little bit too - gluey too tight and if you had any amount of hair at all they're just about killed yourself meanwhile did any of you ever feel that you should have been given a small piece of moon rock every two hundred million people in this country believe that we all were given moon rocks they could not believe that because you flew in space or you went to the moon you don't have a moon rock I don't have any feeling one way or that when I'm 99 years old I would like to have a moon rock to give them my daughter that won't occur unfortunately and I think it won't occur again because of NASA's concern over public opinion should they give a moon rock to a guy who went to the moon should they give him the watch he flew with to the moon I don't know whether we should or not so maybe we will let him work for 50 years but we won't give it to him I had a five or six on my living room floor when I flying back these little things have been floating by and I just pick him up and put him down and put him in my little ditty bag and I got to keep my diddy bag and I shook it out on the living room floor and there was this this pile of moon rocks and I carefully put him in a little jar and take took him down and turned them into the lunar receiving laboratory and brand you know who can you show it to and she will believe you I think it means more I don't regret that I had don't have one I think my family does it really meant a lot daddy could not believe it when I sent him to come back but we don't have one ever expected one Charlie sure cross my heart I never it but it doesn't mean I wondered what it was like for an astronaut to come back from the moon from an experience he could never hope to repeat was it difficult to readjust al Shepard said it best there was disappointment I miss it I still fly airplanes which helps to a degree but I find plenty of challenges in the world today yeah I'm just gonna ask him in this eye on maturity doesn't get crack sometimes at night when you turned out there and bit up it I guess I get misty-eyed it's really there's a lot of fun of feeling it's a unique place the far off place but yet to me it's very real well but I'm basically not sentimental to the point where I'm going to feel badly about not having an opportunity to go again if you look back at Apollo from the vantage point of ten years later at the extraordinary feats of courage and engineering that NASA and those astronauts accomplished one question stands out more than any other and it's this if landing on the moon gained America the admiration of the world and the opinion polls say it did if in terms of exploration and the desire to unravel the secrets of the beginnings of the solar system Apollo is a major step forward if at the most mundane level Apollo was only the greatest adventure in the history of mankind then why today in 1979 is the idea of sending men into deep space a dead duck to say that it cost too much money is grossly to oversimplify the matter it provided jobs for 400,000 people in the same period Americans spent more money I'm smoking and anyway and to say that the money would have been better spent solving the problem of pollution or malnutrition or any of the other major social problems facing America is to presuppose that there existed at the time sufficient desire to use the money that way and they didn't or they would have no the death of Apollo was a much more complex and intriguing matter than that it involved the political realities of the world outside the NASA monastery it involved the Korean War what going to the moon would do to the careers of Kennedy Johnson and Nixon the unnecessary death of three astronauts the cost of the Vietnam War assassinations race riots and above all whether or not Kennedy's original decision to go was still politically valid only two or three years after it was made and the reason I am saying all this here at the Titusville Royal Oak Country Club just a few miles from Cape Kennedy is because the night before Apollo 11 went the man who perhaps more than anybody else had made it possible for NASA to go to the moon by providing them with the giant rocket Venna von Braun helicoptered in here to a very private dinner party at which he made an interesting statement of face only three years before the entire project was to be killed at that dinner he said this if it had been our intention merely to go to the moon bring back a handful of rocks and soil and forget the entire enterprise then we would certainly have been history's biggest fools and yet that is exactly what they did so were they fools and if so why that's what we're going to be looking at in just over an hour from now on BBC 2 in a program called the other side of the Moon the story that people are willing to tell only now 10 years later about why in the case of Apollo nothing failed like success hope you'll join us then [Music] I get outfit for that salute I'm proud to be an American out there were no program they want a place and what an experience
