In less than seven months, Apollo 17 wrapped up NASA’s moon program. And then it was all history. The hardware and manpower for at least two more trips was paid for and in place, but Congress cut off funding and shut the program down.
In the end, there were nine missions that carried three astronauts each to the moon. Six of these included landings. The story of Apollo 16 is among the lesser known, but we’re talking about the moon here, and this mission deserves its due.
The moon missions were ahead of their time – this underscored by the fact that humans have not left low Earth orbit in the 40 years since. The International Space Station is in low Earth orbit, ranging from 205 to 255 miles up. That’s a mere 30 or 40 times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial airliner. We’ve been doing little more than skirting the outer reaches of our thin atmosphere for the past four decades.
The moon is the distance equivalent of 30 Earths lined up end-to-end – a thousand times farther than typical low Earth orbits. There’s no contest here; the Apollo journeys simply dwarf anything we’ve done since.
During the moon landings, most of us expected that it wouldn’t be long before we headed for Mars or somewhere “out there,” and many held on to that hope.
But over time, as projected Mars missions receded further into the future, many who witnessed humans walking on the moon realized we might not live to see humans leave low Earth orbit – let alone reach Mars.
Even more, it’s possible that an entire generation – those too young to remember the moon landings, and those born soon afterward – might also never see that dream. Who would have guessed that an entire generation might “slip through the crack” like this.
Perhaps one of the fledgling commercial concerns will fill the gap. Or maybe it will be China, Russia or Europe. Great wonders unfold daily; it’s an exciting time to be alive.
Some 40- and 50-year-old records are just now being matched or broken. On March 25, filmmaker James Cameron made the first seven-mile dive into the Marianas Trench since explorer Don Walsh’s record dive in 1960. That same year, Air Force Col. Joe Kittinger jumped from his helium balloon at 102,800 feet to freefall and parachute to the ground. This summer, skydiver Felix Baumgartner will attempt to break that record from 120,000 feet.
The following year, the era of human space exploration began as Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth on April 12, 1961. Just a short eight years later, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
In another three years, it was Apollo 16’s turn. Like all Apollo flights, this one featured its fair share of high drama as mistakes were made, problems arose and solutions ultimately found.
Right off the bat, a gyroscope issue set back the launch – the first technologically motivated delay of an Apollo mission. But on April 16, the mighty Saturn V rocket lifted the crew on their way.
Four days later, Apollo 16 was at the moon. The Lunar Module had already separated and started down to the surface when a malfunction in a back-up steering system for the Command/Service Module was discovered. It looked like the landing might have to be scrubbed, so Young and Duke guided the Lunar Module back to an unprecedented rendezvous with Mattingly and the Command/Service Module in case its engines were needed to get them all to Earth.
In an unrelated event during this rendezvous, Duke accidentally got doused with several ounces of orange juice from the juice bag in his helmet. It clogged his microphone, matted his hair down and coated the inside of his helmet. He had to wash it and apply an anti-fogging agent to his visor. Stray juice may also have contributed to a sticky valve in the Lunar Module’s environmental control system.
After a six-hour effort, a “work around” was found for the Command/Service Module problem, and the Lunar Module finally descended to the surface, landing a few hundred feet from its target. Young radioed, “Sweet 16 has arrived!” They later discovered that, had they landed 70 feet in any direction from where they did, the Lunar Module would have been on a dangerous slope.
But due to the delay in orbit, they were too tired for their first moon walk, choosing instead a night’s sleep. Two hours after landing, they were in their hammocks sleeping soundly, and among the first crews to do so – although Duke was awakened twice that night by cabin warning lights.
The next day, Duke – at 36 – became the youngest human to walk on the moon. Unfortunately for him, he may be remembered more for breaking a cable for the important heat flow experiment after getting it caught around his foot.
When they got the moon rover out, Young found that when driving the rover away from the Sun, shadows out ahead virtually disappeared, and navigating the almost featureless land proved a challenge. On a lighter note, when he didn’t like the way he parked the rover, he and Duke simply picked it up and moved it.
On day two, Young accidentally tore off part of a rear-wheel dust guard, and they got sprayed with dust when riding from then on.
They drove up Stone Mountain to 700 feet above the landing module – the highest ever. That’s more than the radio towers on Mount Tom here in the Pioneer Valley. Duke gushed over the spectacular views.
A final rover trip took them four miles north to their largest crater. Spooked because they couldn’t see to the bottom, they dared not get any closer to the steep edge. On a downhill run, the rover set a lunar land speed record of 10.6 mph. Ultimately they covered more than 16 miles.
When Young and Duke trudged through some deep lunar dust, they left tracks eerily reminiscent of my own in fine, dry, powdered snow during winter treks in the mountains here. Candid moments like Young clumsily breaking down the side of a small crater wall as he stumbled by convey a real sense of their experience in those stiff suits.
Among other things, they set up the first astronomical observatory (an ultraviolet camera) on the moon, and found that the highlands were not volcanic in origin as expected. They expertly set up cameras for unrivaled perspectives, while back on Earth others were busy taping together panoramas using Polaroid shots of the TV monitors.
After 71 hours on the surface, and a record 20 hours and 12 minutes outside, Young and Duke blasted off as the rover camera followed ascent stage well into the black sky.
On the way home, Mattingly took a “deep-space” walk to retrieve some film from the Service Module while still 170,000 miles out in the void between the Earth and moon.
On April 27, 1972, Apollo 16 slammed into Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, blew through the 5,000-degree temperatures of re-entry, and parachuted to a splashdown about a mile from the USS Ticonderoga recovery ship.
Young later commented that they’d “seen as much in 10 days as most people see in 10 lifetimes.” Can’t argue with that!
Follow ever-changing celestial highlights in the Skywatch section of the Weather Almanac in the Daily Republican and Sunday Republican.
Patrick Rowan has written Skywatch for The Republican since 1987 and has been a Weather Almanac contributor since the mid-1990s. A native of Long Island, Rowan graduated from Northampton High School, studied astronomy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the ¤’70s and was a research assistant for the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. From 1981 to 1994, Rowan worked at the Springfield Science Museum’s Seymour Planetarium, most of that time as planetarium manager. Rowan lives in the Florence section of Northampton with his wife, Clara, and cat, Luna.