Cape Kennedy, December 6, 1972. In an almost unreal scenario, since at night, the last spectacular chapter of NASA’s Apollo Program takes place, which has led up to that moment, for the first time in the history of mankind, 10 astronauts on the lunar surface. Which would have become 12, if Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, and the scientist Harrison Schmitt, had also left that night, with the launch scheduled for 21.53 local time, and above all if they had landed on the 11th, among the lunar mountains of Littrow.
In fact, due to the particular position of the Littrow area, north-east of the lunar equator, it was necessary to carry out a launch in the middle of the night.
Today, exactly fifty years after that last lunar landing, the program to send astronauts to the Moon has resumed with the Artemis Program. No longer just a NASA program, but in cooperation with Europe (and Italy in the front row), Canada and Japan.
And just like then, Artemis’s number one mission, with its Orion spacecraft for now still without a human crew on board (true heir to Apollo) which is traveling fast on the Moon-Earth journey, started with SLS, the most power of NASA since the days of the legendary Saturn 5, in the middle of the night: 1, 47 against 0,33 of the launch of Apollo 17, whose luminosity during the ascent into space was visible as far as Cuba.
“Hello, my name is Gene Cernan? And you ?”.
Although, even by his own admission Eugene Andrew Cernan, born in Chicago in March 1934, and died in Houston in January 2017, is endowed with a very pronounced ego, the first thing that struck the man who last left his fingerprints on the Luna, it’s really a great modesty: «Yes, I’m the last man on the moon. Don’t write that it was Schmitt, because I was the last one to go back on the LEM … But I guess people don’t care that much.. oops! Shall I moderate my language?” -he told us once giggling.
Gene was also famous for his jokes, based precisely on what he called “moments of enormous popularity, where you could not walk, to others of absolute indifference”. Once, in Houston, a small group of tourists looking for astronauts ended up in their neighborhood. Cernan was tending the garden of his villa, dressed as a gardener, when they approached him: «Excuse me, can you tell us where the astronauts live?». «Well, try looking down the street, maybe someone lives there». And she went into the house giggling like him.
Despite the lightheartedness, which once caused him to fall with a training helicopter into a river at Cape Kennedy, miraculously saving himself from the flames escaping from the explosion and swimming underwater, his career has never been in question. Pilot of Gemini 9 in 1966 and second American to make a “spacewalk”, then in 1969 he piloted the lunar module of Apollo 10 until it touched the Moon, thus making possible the first landing of the following Apollo 11. And then , the final gem: commander of Apollo 17, last and longest, complex and spectacular Apollo mission.
A close-up of Cernan in the Apollo on the Earth-Moon round trip
Spectacular mission, despite the general indifference
Apollo 17, which NASA celebrates these days with some events in which Harrison Schmitt and the families of Cernan and Evans take part, occurred in the midst of a period of NASA budget cuts and an atmosphere of “recession” compared to the moments of glory of the sixties.
Not only in Italy, but also in the United States itself, the mission ended up on the inside pages of newspapers and normal news reports.
In Italy, RAI, which had dedicated great resources to the Apollo feats «like no other in Europe» – Tito Stagno, historic commentator of those feats once told us, did not remove the monoscope at 6 in the morning to broadcast the launch live . At the beginning of the broadcasts, which usually started at 8, he sent a half-hour special with the spectacular night broadcast: Piero Forcella was in the studio and Jas Gawronski was at Cape Kennedy. Then, reports of lunar walks and explorations in the news and a special for the ditching that put an end to the legendary lunar program.
In the crew, the first scientist by profession
A great novelty of Apollo 17, was represented by the lunar module pilot, who in reality was not a professional pilot, but a lunar and planetary geologist. The first professional scientist to be part of an American space mission was therefore Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who was part of a small group of five scientists whom NASA had selected and started training in 1965, with the aim, in particular, to prepare them for the missions of the Skylab space laboratory.
But Jack had already gained great experience as a lunar geologist and had been part of the scientific staff that had trained the astronauts of the previous Apollo lunar flights, especially for Apollo 15 and 16, certainly more scientific missions of the program.
Schmitt was intended for the Apollo 18 mission, which was canceled following NASA budget cuts in 1969.
And therefore, in order to finally have a scientist and planetologist on the Moon, after strong pressure from the American scientific community, it was necessary to insert Schmitt on the previous Apollo 17. And this to the detriment of the super-prepared Joe Engle, expected in Cernan’s crew and both reserves of Apollo 14, one of the test pilots of the legendary X-15 rocket ship and later assigned to command one of the first test flights of the Space Shuttle.
The last landing, at Taurus-Littrow
During their twelfth revolution around the Moon, Cernan and Schmitt separated the lunar module “Challenger” from the command and service module “America”. While Ron Evans carried out the precautionary maneuver with absolute precision, placing “America” for a possible emergency reunion maneuver with “Challenger”, in an orbit of 125 by 100 kilometers, Eugene Cernan brought the lunar module to descend between a chain of mountains 2,130 meters high, touching the selenic surface between the “Taurus” mountains and the “Littrow” crater, on the border with the Sea of Serenity.
Cernan complained that with about three minutes of fuel left in the “Lunar Module” tanks, he could have flown over the crater slope: «No thanks, Gene», the Apollo 17 commander communicated from the Mission Control Center in Houston , «We are fully satisfied with the area you are in».
The area where the “Challenger” had landed, had been chosen for Apollo 17, following what was reported by Alfred Worden, who had been the command module pilot of Apollo 15 in the summer of 1971; Worden had noticed conical-shaped hillocks, very similar to those that form on Earth when volcanic debris accumulates around cracks in the ground.
Cernan and Schmitt worked intensely: from 11 to 14 December they carried out an exploration of the area of the Taurus Mountains and of the Littrow crater, carrying out geological investigations, thanks to the attentive eye of Schmitt, taking samples of the subsoil, drilling the ground, installing thermometers for measurement of lunar heat flux, and installing a gravimeter that will record changes in the force of gravity due to tides, and other experiments.
After the three lunar excursions, lasting a total of 21 hours (on foot and with the use of the LRV, the lunar jeep), Commander Cernan, a bit like Armstrong and Aldrin had done during the first landing, read a sentence engraved on a plaque located near the LEM ladder: «Here man completed his first exploration of the Moon, in December 1972. May the spirit of peace, in the name of which we have come here, reflect on the lives of all men». On the plate the signatures of Cernan, Schmitt and Evans, and that of the US President, Nixon.
Cernan and Schmitt departed from the Moon on December 14, then rejoined the spacecraft piloted by Evans, and returned by splashdown in the Pacific on December 19, 1972. Lunar exploration was over and since then no other astronauts have landed on the surface selenic.
Cernan, last to have left footprints on the Moon, with the first, Neil Armstrong during a speech to the US Congress in 2010
The Apollo 18, 19 and 20 gates. But now, green light for Artemis
Apollo 17 was the mission of records: the longest (it lasted almost 13 days), the one with the longest lunar stay (3 days and 3 hours, including 22 hours and 4 minutes in the three lunar excursions). The kilometers traveled were 35, the kilos of lunar rocks collected 110.5. Furthermore, the equipment used for the latest experiments is the most sophisticated ever used.
The Apollo program originally included three other missions, all canceled due to NASA budget cuts. According to the original program, Apollo 18, as mentioned, was to bring Richard Gordon and Harrison Schmitt to the Moon, while Vance Brand was to wait for them on the mother spaceship. With Apollo 19 however, Fred Haise and Gerald Carr had to land, while Paul Weitz had to wait for them in orbit. With
An attempt was also made to approve an Apollo 18 destined not to descend to the Moon, but to go around it for a mission around the poles loaded with equipment to look for traces of ice water deposits: the crew was to be made up of Young, Duke and Roosa.
But this mission too was not approved: too expensive for a type of research that will then be entrusted to automatic probes, such as the current LRO. The Shuttle Program was upon us, and with it that of a large orbiting space station. And this is today’s story, which however is also about to become yesterday’s story, with the Artemis program now ready to send men and women to the Moon, to build a permanent colony there: “And then to aim for Mars,” he said most recently Mike Sarafin, head of the Artemis Program for NASA. «With Artemis 1 we have achieved the success that we expected, and now we are ready to send astronauts to the Moon on the Gateway station, and then on its surface. Soon, already at the beginning of 2023, we will announce the crews ».