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“God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind”

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Harrison Schmitt gripped the controls of the lunar module as he stared straight ahead focusing all his concentration on the task at hand.

Only when they were pitching over did he break his trance briefly to cast a glance at what was below him. A dark valley lay underneath tall white mountains. At 60 feet above the surface of this new world he heard the sharp caution from his companion to watch out for those boulders. Schmitt acknowledged thinking no one ever said landing on the moon was going to be easy.

Taking a deep breath, Commander Eugene Cernan spotted the blue contact light flicker on. The footpad of the Lunar Module (LM), or “Lem” as it was affectionately dubbed, was within a few feet of touchdown. Their LM “Challenger” continued to descend effortlessly towards the lunar valley known as the Taurus-Littrow - situated along a ring of mountains on the southeastern edge of the Mare Serenitatis basin.

Cutting the engines, the machine dropped for a momentary free fall before jolting the two astronauts. Flipping switches and reading gauges, Schmitt maintained his long stare. The 37-year-old from Santa Rita, New Mexico hadn’t grasped the opportunity laying before him. Ten men had walked on the moon prior to his arrival but none of them were trained scientists. Now the only geologist in NASA was about to become the envy of millions of his colleagues down through the ages. To think of the astronomers and physicists who looked up at the moon, studied her shape, analyzed and named her craters - men like Alhazen, Galileo and Procter. Since the Babylonian age, science obsessed over Earth’s only natural satellite. On the evening of Dec. 11, 1972, science was about to step onto the dusty surface of the elusive Moon for the first time.

Remarkably, it was 40 years ago this month that human beings visited the Moon for the last time thus far in history. Apollo 17 was the sixth successful landing on the moon closing out America’s manned lunar program which began over a decade earlier when President Kennedy committed the nation to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Employing what would be considered crude technology today, American astronauts flew to the moon and returned safely to the Earth nine times. In December, 1968, Apollo 8 broke out of low-Earth orbit to become the first manned spacecraft to reach another celestial body. Months later, Apollo 10 tested the limits of the Lunar Module in preparation for the historic landing of Apollo 11. The ill-fated Apollo 13 aborted its landing in April, 1970.

While the curious scientific mind of Schmitt couldn’t wait to be unleashed onto this undiscovered country, Cernan was literally bursting at the seams. The 38-year-old naval aviator had been here before. During Apollo 10, Gene Cernan and Thomas Stafford had piloted the Lunar Module “Snoopy” to within 50,000 feet of the moon’s surface. Being so close it must have been tempting for both ambitious pilots (NASA legend has it that “Snoopy” carried half the fuel required to prevent them from attempting a landing).

Apollo 10 was, perhaps, the most important of the lunar missions. Serving as the dress rehearsal for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 landing, Cernan and Stafford tested new procedures for the lunar orbit rendevous between the LM and the Command Service Module (CSM), nicknamed “Charlie Brown” and piloted by John Young. They also had to test the landing radar and photograph the proposed inaugural landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. They were the most experienced crew to fly into space. While he had badly wanted the first landing more than anyone, this was the closest Tom Stafford got to the moon. Young went back as commander of Apollo 16. Soon it would be Cernan’s turn.

By 1972, the age of lunar exploration was in its twilight. The excitement and allure of the space program faded since the pinnacle achievement of Apollo 11. NASA was turning its attention to the future - Skylab and the space shuttle. A sombre Mission Control in Houston wanted to get Apollo 17 over with as soon as possible. Some even conceded, privately, that the flight should be cancelled as with every excursion to the moon lay the risk of losing the crew. Such a tragedy would surely kill the space program. Cernan bristled at this kind of talk. He turned down other flights so he could command his own mission. He knew Apollo 17 was going to be the last, at least for a while, so he was determined to make the most of it.

One of the battles Cernan lost was keeping Joe Engle on his crew. NASA caved to immense pressure from the National Academy of Sciences to send a geologist to the moon. Schmitt took Engle’s spot, a decision Cernan resented. Astronauts were trained in geological field techniques (Apollo 17 spent some time in Sudbury). Nevertheless, the commander came to respect Schmitt, only the second civilian to go to the moon, as a pilot. Schmitt, who earned his degree at the California Institute of Technology before receiving his doctorate from Harvard, had been with the program for quite some time. He devised and facilitated the lunar field geological training for the Apollo crews. Rounding out the crew was Command Module Pilot (CMP) Ronald Evans, a 39-year-old former navy pilot who had seen flown combat sorties in Vietnam.

A half hour past midnight on Dec. 7, a powerful SaturnV rocket blasted off from Cape Canavrel’s launch pad 39-A. After a four-day journey, Apollo 17 successfully completed lunar orbit insertion. The following afternoon, the Lunar Module “Challenger” undocked from the Command Service Module “America.” During his lonely vigil aboard “America,” Evans mapped the surface while recording the streaks of lights astronauts often encountered during their sleep (the theory being that this phenomenon was some form of cosmic ray).

Three hours later, “Challenger” swept downward towards the Sea of Serenity. NASA selected this region after Apollo 15 CMP Al Worden spotted conical mounds here during one of his orbits in 1971. These mounds were similar to those formed on Earth by volanic debris accumulating around a vent. Cernan pinpointed their landing site on the floor of the Taurus-Littrow, a region surrounded by high mountain ranges created some 3.9 billion years ago when a large meteor struck the moon. Coming with 200 metres of its objective, “Challenger” touched down amid a field of craters at 3:15 p.m. eastern standard time.

Looking out the window, Dr. Schmitt made several observations to confirm their location. He spotted the valley walls, known as the North and South Massifs, noting they looked more like flattened pyramids. The height of the massifs gave the valley a depth greater than that of the Grand Canyon. On the plain, he saw rolling hills littered with boulders. It was, as he described it later, “a geologist’s paradise.”

At 6:55 p.m., Captain Cernan and Dr. Schmitt exited the LM. They offloaded the Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV), the two-seated, four-wheeled dune buggy which had been employed on the previous two landings. Using the LRV, the pair drove to a spot 185 metres from the lander to deploy the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), a set of tests which included measuring any possible gravity waves and the extraction of rock samples. Drilling the deep core holes for the heat flow experiment, Cernan’s heat rate suddenly spiked to 145. He had been eating up more oxygen than was scheduled for these tasks. Collecting 14 kilograms of samples, their first Extra-vehicular Activity, or EVA, was done at seven hours, 12 minutes.

After a meal and a well-deserved sleep, Cernan and Schmitt climbed aboard the LRV for a trip to the South Massif. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made that inaugural landing in July, 1969, they only ventured as far as 90 metres from the LM. Moving at speeds as high as 18 kilometres per hour, the Apollo 17 astronauts would venture farther than any previous crew. During the three EVAs, Cernan and Schmitt covered 36 kilometres in all.

Reaching the lower slopes of the 7,500-foot Massif in over an hour, the astronauts went quickly to work collecting soil and rock samples and taking traverse gravimeter measurements. The area was peppered with a wide variety of different rocks and boulders, with colours of bluish-grey and tan-grey - some never before seen. Houston agreed to extend their stay at the Massif to 63 minutes, however, they remained concern that they would have enough oxygen for the trip back. It was worth it one of those samples proved to be 4.5 billion years old, the oldest rock taken back to Earth.

On the drive back, Cernan kicked up what looked to Schmitt like orange-coloured soil. It appeared the astronauts had stumbled on a volanic vent. Running against the clock, the two men hastily dug a trench, extracted a core sample and took a few scoops before mounting the rover. Schmitt hoped the rust-coloured soil would confirm the existence of water on the moon. However, an analysis three months later by the U.S. Geological Survey concluded the soil contained tiny glass beads, formed by the heat generated by an ancient meteor impact. By the time, Cernan and Schmitt made it back inside the “Challenger,” they had set an EVA record for time and distance travelling 19 kilometres round trip in an unprecedented seven hours, 34 minutes.

The third, and final, moonwalk began the following evening with the explorers heading north towards the North Massif. Their first stop was five boulders perched on the side of the massif, each the size of a London double decker bus. Cernan and Schmitt took measurements, panoramic photos and performed other experiments at four locations, including the slope of the Massif, a ridge called the Sculptured Hills and the Van Serg Crater, where they deployed an explosive charge that would profile any seismic activity beneath the surface.

Back at the “Challenger,” they parked the rover in its final resting place and finished packing up the samples, a big haul of 115 kilograms. With the television cameras broadcast the images back to Houston, Dr. Schmitt handed Cernan a breccia, a rock composed of many fragments that have grown together as one cohesive form, which they planned to bring back to be distributed to museums around the world. Cernan told the audience back home that this special rock symbolized a world living in peace and harmony.

Then Jack Schmitt, his heart heavy that the expedition was coming to an end, entered the capsule leaving Captain Cernan alone at the footpad. It was at 11:34 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 14, when he looked around, glanced up at the earth and delivered the final words to be spoken on the moon: “As I take man’s last steps from the surface, back home for some time to come - but we believe not too long into the future. I believe history will record that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”

With that, Gene Cernan climbed up the ladder - the last human to visit the moon. Behind him left on the front landing gear, which would stay behind, was a commemorative plaque that read: “Here man completed his first explorations of the moon, December 1972 A.D. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.”

Sean Chase is a Daily Observer multimedia journalist

sean.chase@sunmedia.ca

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