The Untold Story Of The Last Man On The Moon | Apollo 17 | Spark

the eyes of the world now look into space to the moon and to the planets beyond on the 25th of May 1961 President John F Kennedy of the United States of America committed the resources of his nation and launched project Apollo the greatest technological undertaking in the history of mankind I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth [Music] [Music] [Applause] this was the race to space working to beat the Russians the enthusiasm was absolutely tremendous people were absolutely glued to their televisions it was a transformative events in human history one-fifth of humanity watched Neil Armstrong's footsteps in 1969 but only two years later in 1972 public and political interest in Apollo had dwindled NASA was forced to cancel their last three missions making Apollo 17 man's final mission to the moon astronauts Eugene Cernan Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans were the three brave men chosen to fly NASA's final mission they have been written up in history books and acknowledged by the space and scientific communities but have never received the public recognition they truly deserved yet upon Seventeen's voyage to the moon was the crowning glory of man's lunar exploration paolo 17 broke so many records the crew spent three days on the lunar surface their moon walks lasted eight hours they covered a greater distance than any other mission the scientific legacy about where 17 has been enormous how deploy 17 not happened when indeed I shudder to think really what textbooks would have to say even now about the early history of the solar system 17 did mark the end of an era since then we haven't traveled into space as far a ploy 17 is the hidden jewel of the US lunar space program the world knows how the Apollo program began but very few truly understand how it ended this is the remarkable story of the determination and courage of a generation a tribute to three brave astronauts and the thousands of men and women behind them during the final days of NASA's Apollo program in 1961 when President Kennedy launched the Apollo program the Space Age was only in its fourth year the commitment of sending a man across the hostile ocean of space to the moon was bold but necessary America urgently needed a powerful demonstration of its technological superiority to convince the world that it could still contain the threat of Soviet aggression I think the Americans were very confident that they had a much superior system they were looking towards the Soviet Union as a pretty backward Society and then all of a sudden on the 12th of April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the planet that put the Americans certainly at a cultural level into a bit of a panic it's fair to say that if the Americans had put the first human being into space then we wouldn't have had the political drive for success that culminated in project Apollo in the 1960s the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA began assembling a task force of 400,000 top scientists and technicians that over the next seven years would develop the vast spectrum of technologies needed to put a man on the moon I got involved in the Apollo principally because of my I think obsession with spaceflight I started with reading down there and Eagle like a lot of people did and then there was an advert in the Daily Telegraph which said they were looking for people to work on the Apollo program in the States and I thought this was just the bee's knees so I applied and got the job I thought I'd died and gone to heaven everybody who worked on Apollo was so enthusiastic of course it was the race to space and it was just magic involvement in the Apollo program was really a fantastic thing it seemed that almost anything was possible I worked for lucky the electronics company and I supported the guidance and control division laboratory it was exciting at times it was scary at times but working on it gave a sense of achievement Kennedy's dream was finally realized in July 1969 when Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface marking man's most significant accomplishment in the history of exploration photographs of flags and footprints were beamed around the world America's prestige had been re won and they established themselves as the world's superpower politically the race to beat the Russians to the moon had been won but NASA's scientific mission was just beginning over the next two years their confidence and proficiency in lunar exploration went from strength to strength but in 1970 despite this monumental achievement the ten proposed missions were cut short making Apollo 17 NASA's final lunar mission the public was losing interest because they just saw people going to the moon time time again apparently doing the same things not realizing what science was being done so with a lack of public interest the government started to lose interest scientifically so tremendous loss and had eighteen nineteen and twenty being allowed to continue then has no doubt our knowledge of the moon and the history of the early solar system it would be much bigger now than what it is have those missions continued so scientifically there was every reason to continue them if Apollo 17 was to be the last visit to the moon NASA needed to make it count NASA's growing confidence in supporting longer operations meant that Apollo 17 would become the most productive lunar mission of the entire program folly 17 was a mission of superlatives in so many ways and it broke so many records the crew spent three days on the lunar surface their moon walks lasted eight hours they covered a greater distance than any other mission and yet by December 1972 most of the American public and much of the global public had lost interest completely so I always think of Apollo 17 as being the hidden jewel of the US lunar space program Apollo 17s mission commander was former US Navy pilot and veteran astronauts Eugene Cernan he is one of only three men who have voyage to the moon twice Cernan first flew on the Gemini program and later became the lunar module pilot on Apollo 10 the dress rehearsal for the lunar landing where he flew within 15 kilometers of the surface Cernan had to wait three years and six missions until he would fly again and finally set foot on the moon Gene Cernan was very good he was very very competent and all these people were so keen to do a good job on the moon it was it was really amazing they really wanted to to put our hardware out there and get it working and getting the science command module pilot Ronald Evans was selected late into the Apollo program while flying combat missions in Vietnam Apollo 17 would be his first and only spaceflight Joe Engel was the proposed lunar module pilot but after Apollo 18 was cancelled and it became clear that this would be the final lunar mission the scientific community pressed NASA to select a scientist astronaut to go to the moon Engle was dropped from the program and Harrison Schmitt also known as Jang Schmidt took his place to become the first and only geologist to step foot on the moon Jack Schmitt was picked as one of the first six original scientists astronauts in 1965 people said he had a fanatical focus upon Apollo that there was some of his colleagues who doubted that he had any other life apart from Apollo but he got himself noticed for the right reasons totally committed changed geology training for the astronauts raised the profile of geology within the entire program I'm Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 15 he was the backup lunar module pilot the experiments that I was working on had to be exercised by each crew member before we loaded them into the lunar module and sent them off to the moon so Hersh and Schmitt came over to have a look at the experiment and picked up the magnifying glass and he looked at it and he said do you know what the geologist does when he finds a rock to look at and we said no and he said he does this he said have you ever tried doing that in a spacesuit but he was a great guy to work with very easy and very professional as most of them were on the 6th of December 1972 the countdown to launch and begun on the pad at the Kennedy Space Center stood the enormous Saturn 5 rocket it is still the largest vehicle ever to put human beings in space it weighed about six point two eight million pounds of thrust of the first stage was 7.5 million pounds just a really remarkable accomplishment the one thing that I don't think anybody in this business ever feels is fear otherwise you would not be out there walking to the rocket you better have gotten used to that idea a long time ago the thing that's different about launch day is that the launch pad is empty there's nobody else there but you once that van drops you off at the spacecraft and you get in that elevator you get in the elevator or any other time you're out there looking at things that are people you know like ants they're everywhere but not that night and then we went across the catwalk to the command module of hatch it was a steel mesh floor so walking over you could look down and see the whole thing most everybody gets a little bit of a feeling in their stomach when they do that at 12:33 on the morning of December 7th 1972 they got the Gopher launch [Music] [Music] Paulo seven teams the only night launch of the Saturn 5 rocket it turned night into day and even from 500 miles away it was incredibly bright and light sky I think it was a fitting end to project Apollo that that night Lord really summarized what the whole program is around [Music] one of the things that you don't get in your training is the physical feeling of the launch and I'm common ground it's a very heavy low-frequency vibration the first thing that I remember thinking was why did we do all the simulations because I couldn't read anything on the gauges that vibration was something [Music] [Music] [Music] we have you go for our bet here go [Music] [Music] we had two orbits of the earth before we were going to restart that third stage rocket that had inserted us into orbit in order to accelerate to 25,000 miles an hour and go to the moon at a distance of 45,000 kilometers the crew took what is believed to be the most widely distributed photographic image of all time famously known as the Blue Marble this incredible image was the first picture of the fully illuminated face of planet Earth we are seeing the earth as it truly is a grand oasis in the vastness of space we take off hannett for granted but seeing it like that sort of isolated from everything it just gave a different perspective and I think in some ways it almost stimulated the environmental movement we saw our planet as a whole and we sought as vulnerable the picture of the earthers of blue marble brought home to people how fragile our earth is and how stupid all the arguments are between nations we're just all on this big spaceship together and we better get along no human being has since been at a distance we're taking a whole earth photograph like this has been possible exactly which of the Apollo crew took these amazing images unclear but like so many other aspects of the Apollo program this breathtaking photograph changed our perception of our beautiful planet forever Seventeen's landing site was a small valley located in the taurus littoral region taurus littrow sits close to the edge of an impact basin this vance basin was formed about 3.9 billion years ago as a result of a comet or asteroid collision the saint's geological significance was of great interest to NASA taurus-littrow was chosen as a landing site for the last Apollo mission because it was a mixture of Highland and lowland terrain and of course they had a geologist as the principle investigator if you like on the mission itself and I guess he was in his element driving around they at the moon's surface [Music] after four days and traveling 380,000 kilometers the crew of Apollo 17 began orbiting the moon [Music] we as human beings committed ourselves to a gravitational field with another planet and that was the first time Apollo was the first time that human beings did that there's no absolute guarantee that you were going to return but it broke that bond with the earth that ultimately I'm sure will lead humans on a path to the settlement away from our earth command module pilot Ronald Evans stayed in lunar orbit conducting experiments while Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt descended to the surface to complete their research [Music] okay one five one one five one zero entered 42 degrees 47 now 47 degrees through 49 degrees okay off like a fellers done a go for landing retro oh I don't know kids they go no no halftime we're go for landing Salinger yeah I got Oliver Lang I'll need the pro I'll give it to you are we coming in Oh baby and darn and and cry and incredible the lunar module pilot doesn't get to look outside very much my job was to make sure that the commander had information off the computer that would tell him where he was going and gave him information as we got closer to the surface on his good 1,500 feet 54 degrees [Music] into 800 feet they've gotten a little high they I don't need a number anymore okay you're 31 feet per second gone down to 500 that's a little high they don't pick one down and five it feels good in this big vampirism that little forward G getting a little bit then 460 feet or not about 240 feet going on at 325 - feels good 20 feet going down I do and be [Music] [Music] hey if the desire has landed [Music] and the telomeric of endogenous north little magic doctor and remember on December 11th at 7:54 p.m. the lunar module Challenger touched down on the moon's surface [Music] [Music] [Music] I've never put a flag up at my level tall guys are all alike okay I thought like it's waving in the breeze is there how about right there it does when you do that it'll picture you guys I found that let me tell you Bob that flag is a beautiful picture my first concern stepping on the moon was to stay with the timeline and as I came down the ladder I was really was thinking of how we get maximum use of the time that was available I had made a calculation at the time I have no idea whether it's right or not but that the time on the moon was worth about a million dollars a man minute and that got my attention and those are those year dollars not this year dollars we believe here define appraised at the panoramic inner beauty come on now Bob hey Bob effect of the terrain look very flattened food that's why you're an astronomer oh well for the first half hour so I was in very familiar territory because I was primarily looking at the lunar module I was working around it we were unloading things so that we would need including the roving vehicle and things like that when I first had a chance to move away from the spacecraft my first duty was to go to the points of an equilateral triangle around the lunar module and take a set of pictures that would give as much of a pristine view of the landing site as we could and that was the first time I had a chance to really see the lunar module in the context of this place where we had landed taurus-littrow was a deep mountain valley deeper than the Grand Canyon as a matter of fact the mountains on either side rose to 6 and 7,000 feet above the valley floor and were brilliantly illuminated by a Sun is brightest one that you can imagine either in the high snow fields or in the desert but they were silhouetted against a black sky an absolute black sky and that's what you cannot get from the pictures that are printed which doesn't give you the contrast that the eye sees when you're there torez littrow was the most dangerous landing site of the entire apollo program although the risk taken to land in the taurus littrow valley were great the payoff was the opportunity to sample the larger and more diverse selection of geological material than ever before the samples returned would contain rock both older and younger than that of any other Apollo mission Taurus - really was selected because it was a diverse site geologically within a dressy driving distance of the landing site there are these Highland blocks as the North Mercy from the South Massif these Highland blocks were formed as mountains more brittle imagery based on photographs are taken by Apollo 15 had demonstrated the existence of boulders which had rolled down the mountains from high up on the slopes where they'd carved tracks and so accessing these boulders that had rolled down the massif s-- became a high priority in addition to these boulders a small fault runs across the valley quarterly Lincoln scarp which he was considered would beep of geological interest and there was a landslide of clearly a light-colored Highland material - fallen off the South Massif Mountain and covered the valley floor so all in all it was a very geologically diverse valley where a lot could be explored in the time available to the astronauts with their lunar roving vehicle got a bag Compaq the file right underneath the rock in addition to their geological studies Cernan and Schmitt were to perform several experiments the Apollo lunar surface experiment package are all set contained for experiments never before deployed on the moon there was a brand-new experiment to look at the lunar atmosphere and now the lunar atmosphere is a very good vacuum that there are gases around and it was a mass spectrometer that could actually detect different kinds of gases there was a thing called a gravimeter which was a very very sensitive gravity measuring device trying to measure the moon's gravitational pull and looking for very very slow moonquakes to see if they existed there was a lunar ejector and meteoroid experiment which was looking for small meteorites coming down and impacting it dust sized ones and then finally another seismic experiment with explosive charges which were put out on the lunar surface as they drove around in the rover and then they were fired later on from the earth commands were sent when the crew had left and they sent seismic shocks quite deeply down into the surface so that we could see what the strata was like underneath the surface of the Moon the totality of scientific instruments and measurements deployed on the moon by Apollo 17 considering was all done in three days and had to be combined with all this driving around and sampling it's really remarkable [Music] the lunar rover was an outstanding vehicle for field exploration it weighed about 450 earth pounds without anything on it you got a little bit heavier as we got on it and put our equipment there it could go about 6 or 7 miles per hour over that surface now that doesn't sound like very much but I'll tell you remember one-sixth gravity you hit a bump and you're gonna be off the surface a bit then it it does seem like it's going a lot faster than that we actually had it up to 18 kilometers in heart which would be about 12 or 13 miles an hour going downhill once and I think even Gene Cernan regretted going quite that fast it was pretty hard [Music] the rovard was a very very productive vehicle and a tribute to the people who designed and built it the crew were on their first extra vehicular activity or Eevee a when Cernan brushed against the rover a hammer in the shin pocket of his spacesuit canta buggies rear fender and tore it in half Gene Cernan turned around and just scraped against the fender of the lunar roving vehicle and it snapped a little bit of it off now we might think that this was no big deal but we need to remember on the surface of the moon this lunar dust used to get absolutely everywhere with the lunar roving vehicle traveling at about ten or eleven miles an hour at top speed it was throwing lunar dust everywhere not only were the astronauts get covered with the material but the material was very dark now remember in an airless environment if you're exposed to direct sunlight you're gonna heat up massively it's one of the reasons that the outer layer of the Apollo astronaut suits were white and so what seems to us on earth to be a relatively minor issue was going to seriously compromise the potential science that could have been obtained from the rest of the mission with the dust threatening the astronauts safety something had to be done in spite of his thick gloves Gene Cernan managed to unroll and tear off strips of duct tape in an attempt to repair the damaged fender is that like I'm sort of ending the war hope is quick fix solution held out for the next four hours they continued to drive the rover without any problem stopping to drill holes collect core samples and deploy seismic charges but while on a rough patch of lunar terrain the fender broke again and a new problem arose a thick coating of dark lunar dust began covering the rover's batteries which were now absorbing the heat from the Sun and at risk of overheating we got pretty dirty we cleaned our pressure suits between every VA but you could see the scratches on the wrists and on the helmet good engineering is going to have to keep the dust out of things it is very abrasive but you could still see the scratches yours truly doesn't prove I was on the moon but I seem to have had an awful good time while I was there and not at all a bashful about standing around in my underwear back at Houston NASA engineers understood the seriousness of the situation if they couldn't come up with a solution while Cernan and Schmitt slept the next day's exploration would be severely inhibited limiting the astronauts to within walking distance of the lunar module Apollo 16 commander John Young was on the case John Young spent the night working in a space suit back at Houston working out a procedure to fix it and they they worked out that they would use a an old map that they'd already been using they didn't need again they taped it into a curve and then found two little clamps which they could use to clamp it to the dust guard when the astronauts woke the next morning Mission Control and instructions for a replacement fender the new Fender held for the rest of the mission which was to be another 15 hours of EPA's Apollo 17s true science potential was saved by duct tape don't go anywhere without it although the lunar rover allowed the astronauts to cover great distances they still had to travel on foot when setting up experiments and collecting samples they quickly became confident moving in the lower gravity of the [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] they did however end up with their knees in the dust on more than one occasion [Music] okay yep hey mommy - that's my camera Julia over here - your camera I'll get this thing out now that I got it boys put the call get down and do your work when we do call for help click oh poor you any time you fell a little bit homesick you can look up and see the earth only 240,000 miles away I must say though that the communications were outstanding I never felt like slated on the moon at all during their second DVA the crew visited a crater named shorty crater shorty had excited scientists Bank on earth as it's surrounded by a halo of soil that is significantly darker than the general terrain after the seven kilometer drive to shorty crater harrison schmitt looked to the soil stirred up by his feet he found what is considered to be one of the most significant of all Apollo's discoveries well don't move it delight it it's all or boy hold it till I see it up with my feet you know the stereotype about about Sciences being dull and unemotional I think the story of the orange soil on Apollo 17 you just blows that myth to pieces because when you look at the pictures of the Moon they could be color pictures but the moon looks pretty grey and then all of a sudden on Apollo 17 in this monochrome landscape you've got bright orange soil appearing now when this was reported you can hear it in the voices back in Mission Control you know there is orange soil there's excitement and I'll never forget that there's one of the geologists supporting the mission and he is almost shaking with excitement the significance of this was that the orange soil it was thought could be evidence of volcanic activity now this landing site had been chosen specifically to try and look for evidence of volcanic activity so it's I think the words that Jack Schmitt used well I think we found what we were looking for when analyzed to a microscope the colored soil turns out to be made of tiny tens of micron sized orange glass beads that's been erupted in a fire fountain eruption in the in the taurus littrow valley the orange glasses are in fact the youngest samples found in the taurus littrow valley but they're still 3.6 thousand million years old because the moon seems to be so dry it had been assumed that the primary volatile responsible for driving these fire fan turnings was carbon dioxide gas but evidence has been found that some of these volatiles responsible for driving this volcanism may have been water after all and so these glasses are still 40 years on actively at the centre of Luna Luna science today and as I step out onto the plane to boil it all Oh what did I say buddy there's not a cloud that Pitney earth the astronauts third and finally VA provided an opportunity to study the large boulders that had rolled down the north wall of the taurus littrow valley this large boulder had rolled down the North Massif about a kilometer and a half I'm there for scale it hit a change in slope and broke broke into five pieces there and stopped and it has told us a great deal about the nature of these huge impacts that have occurred on the moon and before that occurred on the earth that's one of the plaques bobbinet Korea a light colored fragment they've learnt the full height of it about a metre and a half thick and then it got there the grey a blue glow rock on the other side I think dry approps in the pillow boulder field just minding my own business [Music] in lunar orbit Ronnie vans conducted extensive experiments from the command module America charting the lunar surface using a panoramic camera and laser altimeter used in conjunction with other scientific instrumentation Evans collected more information for accurately mapping the surface of the Moon the invaluable images and data collected by Apollo are still widely used by research scientists and astronomers today Ron Evans so seemed to have a lot of fun while he was alone up there one of the problems with source of our water was that a little bit of hydrogen would leak into the water and here Ranas worked that hydrogen into a bubble so that he could take it back and demonstrate they had missed getting that hydrogen the reason it was important to us is that you know we what goes in must come out much to the discomfort of your crewmates before leaving for the moon Cernan made a very special promise to his daughter he told her that he would write her initials in the lunar dust making her the only little girl on earth to have her name on the moon just before Apollo 17 left the moon Cernan took a moment to kneel and with a single finger wrote his daughter Traci's initials T DC in the lunar dust knowing those three letters would remain there undisturbed for millions of years [Music] [Music] [Music] Apollo 17 was a record-breaking mission during their three days on the moon Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt completed 22 hours of lunar exploration and research more than any other Apollo mission that had gone before they had driven a total of 34 kilometers through the taurus littrow valley and positioned the most comprehensive set of instruments ever deployed on the lunar surface they had collected and documented over a hundred and ten kilograms of moon rock and soil and taken over 2,400 photographs but now it was time to go home in their final moments on the moon Harrison Schmitt made a rather unusual request there's an interesting scene from the the last moments of the final a VA on the surface of the Moon in Apollo 17 and it was Jack Schmitt and is his hammer throwing now I'm not sure if this is a geologists tradition or it was just a Jack Schmitt tradition but when you look at the footage you can see that gene cernan's getting ready to throw it and Jack really wants to throw it and Gene Cernan almost as a recognition of the great work that he's done says okay Jack you go ahead and do it and you see him throwing it away [Applause] I think that it may well have been an old geologists tradition I know that a definite geologists tradition is is tradition of rolling pebbles or rolling boulders but I was rolling his rope why don't you they all boulder rolling Creek don't hit the road jack schmitt indulged that and he also got gene cernan to do that as well and they did do their rock rolling on the surface of the moon during Apollo 17 the pressure of producing the speech to draw to an end the first set of manned explorations on the moon fell on mission commander Eugene Cernan he had prayed that when the time came he would find words of power and purpose as he surveyed the lunar landscape for the very last time he simply spoke from the heart and closed a chapter of human courage [Music] [Music] the further the expiration of Apollo [Music] back on earth at Mission Control EDF and L who had been responsible for remotely operating the lunar cameras during Apollo 17 was poised to capture the one shot that had eluded NASA over the previous five missions a clean view of the lunar module takeoff this would be the last chance to get his elusive shot with a six second signal delay fend L had to correctly time the movement of the camera with the flight path of the lunar module in advance the results were truly spectacular [Music] [Music] did you feel good that you're back up here it's been a good trip and I've gone to the beautiful vehicle [Music] [Music] following the rendezvous and dunking with Ron Evans in the command module the crew proceeded to transfer the precious lunar samples and film Apollo 17 spent an additional three days in lunar orbit conducting yet more orbital science and they would be the last men to witness the famous earth rise [Music] [Applause] [Music] on the return journey Ron Evans had the chance to complete an Eevee a of his own leaving the safety of the command module he ventured on a spacewalk to retrieve vital film from the on-board external cameras standing quality picture [Music] three days later we'll be vented the Earth's atmosphere our actual entry piqued geez at seven times gravity just for an instant because we wanted to be sure of course we were captured in the atmosphere the command module actually was flown by the computer at thirty five thousand miles an hour almost anything is going to have lift of some kind if you oriented right and in the command module did at this point we had gone through the deployment of brogue shoots at 25,000 feet and then this deployment of the main shoots at about 10,000 feet and we were moving down towards the water leave at about 16 feet per second [Music] apollo 17 may have been viewed by many cynics as a lackluster mission but nothing could be further from the truth when the crew finally splashed down in the warm blue waters of the Pacific Ocean it didn't just signify the closing of the Apollo program but the true end of an era Apollo has transformed the way we look at the moon Apollo has transformed our understanding of the moon's importance there is a treasure trove of discovery still to be made from the lunar samples from the instruments that are still active on the surface of the Moon yes it was an incredibly expensive program but when you've got something which 40 years later is still enabling new scientists to develop new ideas and new theories then that tells you something about the program's value there was an extraordinary period in human history we gained a first-order understanding of another planet for the first time and what was accomplished by the generation of Apollo does symbolize a great new understanding of what we now know about the early history of the earth it symbolizes a new source of resources for the planet particularly in energy and it symbolizes a new path to the settlement of our solar system before we went to the moon all we knew about it was what we could get from telescopes getting to the moon being able to bring samples back to be able to make measurements of its atmospheric magnetic field what its structure was taught us a lot not only about the moon but how the earth and the moon were created originally Apollo 17 was the the culmination of the whole Apollo program and it put a lot of very satisfactory line under the whole thing and scientists are still studying the the data brought back by the whole program certainly Apollo 17 was the most productive scientifically in terms of samples returned and scientific instruments deployed I think 17 did mark the end of an era since then we haven't traveled into space as far that's impetus to get out there - almost travel to the stars has waned it told the man that more or less anything was possible it brought everybody together I think for the first time people all over the world are interested in one thing and what was going on at one time the Apollo missions have ended but we need something to take its place and something to inspire people and something to get us as the human race out there and beyond many believe that a return to the moon holds the key to man's future in space we will be going back to the moon but they must move if we're going to Mars is to go back to the moon because if we can't keep people supported on the moon and keep them in good condition it's no good going to Mars because we won't be able to do it when a heck of a lot further away we can do it we could go to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s we could go to the moon now if we had the political willpower and if we decided to put the financing in none of the astronauts involved would have expected us to be here four decades later and still not having seen a return to the moon but ultimately the Apollo how times will be the challenge of getting a human being to Mars it's not just about exploration it's about securing the future for Humanity that's what human beings have done throughout history we have been a species that wants to explore to push forward our frontiers the earth is a cradle but we can't stay in the cradle forever whatever the future holds one thing is for sure Apollo's overwhelming contribution to science has given us a new perspective on the moon our own unique planet and the universe beyond I was sad that the program going to an end obviously we'd like it to have gone on much longer but even though Apollo ended and we were sad we continued with some really exciting work it was a fantastic experience I definitely feel proud that I was part of the Apollo program even a very minor cog in a big machine if I had my time again I most certainly would move heaven and earth to work on something like that again it was really fun Apollo 17 was a fitting conclusion to a triumphant space program which will inspire future generations for many years to come what NASA achieved in the decade following Kennedy's pledge is a testament to man's ingenuity we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard thirty years ago great British explorer George Mallory who was to die on Mount Everest was asked why did he want to climb it he said because it is they up well space is there and we're going to climb it and the moon and the planets are they and New Hope's for knowledge and peace a day and therefore as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked you

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Id: BfQbs__kc5M

Length: 55min 28sec (3328 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019