William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
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We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. 
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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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
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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.***

Fifty years ago, yesterday in US time, December 13, 1972, the last human foot left the surface of the Moon when the commander of Apollo 17, Gene Cernan, climbed on to the ladder of the LM and up into its tiny oasis of oxygen and life.

Today, December 14 (US Time) is the day they lifted off.

Apollo 17 is my favourite Apollo mission.

Not because it broke almost every record in the book; the heaviest payload sent to the moon and landed on it; the longest stay, the longest spacewalks on the surface, the largest amount of geological samples ever collected; even the highest speed for the Lunar Rover. After a single hold with the Saturn V rocket that delayed the launch by a couple of hours, it suffered not a single glitch, the culmination of the experience and work of all the NASA employees for all of the previous missions. Apollo 11 had showed how to land; Apollo 12 how to land accurately; Apollo 15 how to land accurately between scarily high mountain ranges. It sent the first, and only, scientist to the Moon, fittingly a geologist, Harrison Schmitt, who later served one term as a Republican Senator for New Mexico.

But it is not these things that I remember from fifty years ago. No, it is my favourite mission because of the images held in the mind of a little boy, including the wonderful Mission Patch shown here. I have but one memory of the earlier missions and strangely it’s one of the first, Apollo 8. I suspect it has something to do with the TV being right beside the Christmas Tree, with that strange contrast of a ghostly B&W view of the lunar surface passing slowly across the screen, beside with the promise of evergreen boughs.

In 1969, the Apollo 11 moonwalk was broadcast in New Zealand on B&W TV only after an RNZAF Canberra bomber had sped the recorded videotapes across the Tasman from Australia, where they had been recorded four 1/2 hours earlier.

But by 1972 New Zealand finally had TV satellite dish (although its focus was actually phone calls) and could see the Moonwalks live. Not only that but the TV images were the clearest and sharpest yet, far beyond the blurred images of Apollo 11. Occasionally you could even see the faces of the astronauts through their helmets, when the sun angle allowed. One of my treasured memories is watching one moonwalk for a couple of hours with my Dad, before we drove up into the hills of our second farm to muster our sheep down the roads for shearing: the magic of the New Zealand countryside mixed in my minds eye with the magnificent desolation of the lunar surface.

And within weeks of the mission returning to Earth there was this: the most famous Apollo photograph aside from the the Apollo 8 “Earthrise”shot. This one is called The Blue Marble, the first full picture of our world. It seems appropriate that I just bought a lush copy of this for my sister’s Christmas present, she having admired a copy I had framed many years ago (and always hung in a shadowed place for effect).

So many things about this mission seem appropriate, including even the National Geographic edition from September 1973 that detailed the flight but whose cover showed a New Guinea tribal leader in stunning contrast (I don’t think the choice was deliberate). I regret that I do not have access to that copy as I write this, for it contained one of the most beautiful elegies ever written about the experience of the astronauts on the Moon, “What is it like to walk on Another World”, by Apollo 15 commander, David Scott. These men, despite their training, were not mere technicians.

As an example of the superb TV coverage, here is the landing on December 11, 1972 into the valley of Taurus–Littrow, a point deeper than the Grand Canyon amidst those mountains (called “massifs”). In earlier shots the Command Ship could actually be seen from the LM flying over the valley, ahead and below the LM (orbital mechanics: go figure). Unlike Apollo 11 they landed with fuel to spare. Schmitt’s only comment years later was that Cernan’s flying was “aggressive”: you can hear that in Schmitt’s voice as he warns his commander at one point that their rate of drop is “a little high, Geno”. Note how they go from 18,000 feet altitude to 9,000 feet in just one minute.

This is another of the iconic images from the mission: a composite of photos taken by Gene Cernan, it shows Harrison Schmitt working at Station 6 up on the steep slope of The Sculptured Hills, beside a huge boulder called “Tracey’s Rock” after Cernan’s oldest daughter. The LM is miles away, just to the right of the top of the boulder. If the Lunar Rover had broken down they’d have had to hoof it. The mission planners constantly timed the “walk back limit” in designing these EVA’s.

I also love this shot of Harrison Schmitt, the Stars and Stripes, and the Earth. out of the whole human race there are only two missing here, Gene Cernan, who is taking the photo, and Ronald Evans, who was orbiting the Moon in the Command Ship, America.

And of course, given the day, here is the liftoff from the moon, with a spectacular burst of coloured light (actually a result of the TV camera system) as the LM Ascent stage rocket ignites. What’s impressive is that this view from the TV camera of the Lunar Rover parked a couple of hundred yards away by Cernan earlier, was controlled by a guy called Ed Fendell in Houston, who had to issue the commands to the camera three seconds ahead of what would happen because of the time signals take to travel to the Moon:

As the crew counted down, that’s a 17 picture you see, as Cernan counted down and he knew he had to park in the right place because I was going to kill him, if he didn’t—and Gene and I are good friends, he’ll tell you that—I actually sent the first command at liftoff minus three seconds. And each command was scripted, and all I was doing was looking at a clock, sending commands. I was not looking at the television. I really didn’t see it until it was over with and played back. Those were pre-set commands that were just punched out via time. That’s the way it was followed.

In my edited MP4 copies of the EVA’s on our family video system (Yes, I’m that much of a nerd) there’s an amusing part where Cernan is driving the Rover and you get to see the bouncy view of him driving because the satellite dish just happened to be pointing at the Earth for a few seconds. What’s really impressive is that he knew it, commenting to Houston that they might get some video.

Courtesy of Robert Zimmerman’s Behind The Black space blog (mainly space) is this wonderful 11 minute video analysis of the mission by the current NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, tracing their explorations on the surface for the three EVA’s.

If, as a little boy having just seen this in December 1972, you had told me that we would not return to the Moon for more than fifty years, I would not have believed you. But then I knew nothing of government budget cuts and public boredom.

Having said that, there are signs of life in NASA after the long delay following the end of the Shuttle program’s thirty years of LEO flights (Low Earth Orbit). With a sense of history the first Artemis mission has returned to Earth on December 11 after a successful unmanned mission of the Orion spacecraft around the Moon, a prelude to landing on it.

Orion returning to Earth

The rocket that sent it two weeks ago is even more powerful than the Saturn V. Years behind schedule and billions of dollars over-budget, this milestone at least means that the next mission, Artemis 2 will proceed. But it’s basically a repeat of Apollo 8, with four astronauts going around the Moon (actually they won’t even go into orbit, as Apollo 8 did), and probably not until 2025. Landing is scheduled for 2025 but since NASA has not yet even developed the spacesuits (after spending a billon dollars already), plus other possible delays, I’m expecting 2026 at best. Compared to the pace of Apollo it’s pretty sad, and we can’t even honestly say that its deliberate pace will last longer. SpaceX could well beat it in the next few years, especially since NASA themselves have contracted for SpaceX to produce a lunar landing version of the Starship spacecraft.

** The reference is to the final episode of the 1998 TV mini-series, From The Earth To The Moon, which, in the hands of Hollywood actor, producer and (for this episode) writer, Tom Hanks, combines the story of Apollo 17 with that of the French film maker Georges Méliès‘ creation of his vision of a trip to the Moon, the 1902 Le Voyage dans la Lune.

*** The quote at the beginning is from President John F Kennedy in September, 1962. I still regard it as one of the greatest presidential speeches ever given.