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.
- Look at that. - That's beautiful.
It's gotta be one of the most proud moments of my life, I guarantee you.
For century upon century,
to explore the moon was considered the dream of the addle-brained or foolhardy.
Only divine beings or supermen could withstand
the rigours and distance of such a journey.
But then, early in the 20th century,
mortal humans went aloft on mechanical wings,
defying gravity and redefining the realm of possibility.
Forever after the moon became a goal within the grasp of those on Earth.
For if Man could build a machine to make him fly,
he would eventually build one to take him to the moon.
When and how and who was only a matter of time.
From December of 1 968 to December of 1 972
24 representatives of the human race voyaged to the moon
and half as many walked upon its surface.
In all, nine voyages across the quarter-million mile distance,
from earthly safety to lunar emptiness,
each one of them dangerous and expensive.
The requirements to make the voyage a reality
were the qualities that make humankind unique -
our desire to achieve, our wherewithal and perseverance,
our willingness to sacrifice time, energy and even life
in the long labour needed to solve the problems one by one
over the course of the endeavour.
Most important of all
was humankind's tendency to imagine things that are not possible.
Imagining that it could be done was the very first step taken
in the journey from the earth to the moon.
I was very energetic in 1 902.
I was working for the great Georges Méliès, who I met in the Théâtre Houdin, in Paris.
He was beginning then to work with film
and I was in love with the magic that came out of his camera
which wasn't all that different from the ones used now.
Films had been of ordinary things, like a train coming into a station.
Or a wall being torn down.
He came to me one day and said,
"Jean-Luc, I want to tell an amazing story with my camera.
"I want to take people on a most amazing trip. "
I thought he meant a trip to someplace literal,
to Lyons or Marseilles.
And then he said, "Let's take a voyage to the moonl"
And I said, "How about Nice? It's closer."
But the moon was in Monsieur Méliès' eyes
and this is what he designed and built at the Star Film studios in Montreuil.
Monsieur Méliès had constructed the largest film studio in the world at that time.
Between 1 896 and 1 91 3 he produced over 1 00 films,
each more magical and inventive than the other.
Actors, visual effects specialists, carpenters, costumers,
all under the direct supervision of Monsieur Méliès.
Jean-Luc! Jean-Luc!
Yes! Yes, yes?
Too much powder and he'll burn my set down.
I know. Don't use too much powder!
- Too little and it will not photograph. - Too little will waste our time!
I will use as much as Monsieur Méliès demands!
- We should see a test. - Yes, please.
Could you set it off, please? One, two, three, set it off?
One, two and three!
- Idiot! That's too much! - No, it's perfect.
It's perfect, do you hear? That much, no more, no less.
Monsieur Méliès oversaw every moment of the making of the film.
He was also the lead actor, playing Professor Barbenfouillis.
- Is the grinder ready? - I will find out, sir!
Is the grinder ready? Yes? No? Please talk to me. Thank you.
We're already fighting the light.
Monsieur Méliès, we are almost ready.
No, I am no longer Georges Méliès, I am Professor Barbenfouillis.
Bring it up, bring it up! Higher, higher, higher!
Good, good, very good, very good.
- Is the grinder ready? - Grinders ready!
Start the grinder!
Everyone is talking, anticipation in the air.
Come the astronomers!
You are sure of yourselves,
accomplished and full of pride.
Very good. And now the pages enter.
Enter the pages to present their telescopes to the astronomers.
Admire the telescopes, astronomers. And exit the pages!
Respectfully. Nice.
And now comes Barbenfouillis.
I bow to you sausages.
And now I take my...
Get ready, and...
Slowly raise your telescopes above your head.
Hold it there a moment... Stop the grinder!
Get the stools in!
Méliès would have us stop the film
and run in with whatever it was that was needed to suddenly appear.
We make the exchange, run back off
start the camera and voilà.
A special effect of magic on the screen.
The telescopes have magically changed into stools!
Sit, gentlemen. And here we are.
We will create a huge cannon
which will fire a hollow projectile containing myself and yourself.
This is beginning to sound strange, and you murmur about this,
and I say this projectile will actually journey
all the way from the Earth to the moon!
But you say to yourself, "This is madness!" and you act as if this is madness,
You say, "It is impossible." And I say, "No, it is not impossible!"
Come, Michel, come to me - say I'm nuts!
- You're nuts! You're crazy! - How dare you? I throw papers at you!
it is chaos - chaos in the astronomer's club!
Mayhem breaks out amongst the scientists.
And all this because I propose a voyage to the moon.
How was it? I think it was a good one, no?
T minus two hours, 25 minutes.
I'm the last man to walk on the moon.
Not that anyone gives a shit.
Should I watch my language on this?
I can make the claim of being the last person to set foot on the moon.
I got out of the LEM after Gene did on the first EVAs.
That makes me the 12th and final person to make footprints up there.
It's not like I get stopped at restaurants because of it.
I will bet you $50 and a box of doughnuts
no one knows the names of the last two men on the moon.
And I will tell you why - because they didn't die up there.
They flew a near-flawless mission, they did a hell of a job up there,
and they came back in one piece
but if you didn't get a NASA paycheck you never even knew their names.
Eugene Cernan was a veteran astronaut
who walked in space on Gemini 9 in 1 966.
Exhausted and overheated in his pressure suit, he lost 1 5lbs.
Gambling that the Apollo programme would remain funded by Congress,
he held out for command of Apollo 1 7,
rather than take the job of lunar module pilot on John Young's 1 6 flight.
Harrison Schmitt, or Jack as he is known,
went to the moon with a special relish -
the first and only scientist to go.
He was a geologist by trade and an astronaut by choice.
He had also been instrumental in the training
of every man to walk on the moon before him, and almost didn't get to go himself.
- Congratulations! - What?
It's on TV, you're going to the moon!
Apollo 1 7, you're on the crew!
But I have not heard a thing.
You will - they're finally sending one of us.
The first egghead on the moon. Have a drink for once in your life.
No, I don't celebrate rumours.
Come on!
Harrison Schmitt.
Yes. My sister.
No, I haven't heard anything. I'll let you know when I do.
- Yeah. Bye. - What are they waiting for?
NASA stands for Never Absolutely Sure of Anything.
Harrison Schmitt.
Yes, sir.
Well, I will do the best job I possibly can.
Thank you.
Your drink, sir.
Gentlemen.
To the exploration of the moon.
They might have rued the day that they made the change.
I always had strong ideas about where to go on the moon,
and forcefully suggested them.
Jack had no problem phoning the president of the United States
if he had an idea about what we should be doing with Apollo.
- Like giving us that fourth EVA. - Where we should land...
But the flight rules were not going to be rewritten
just for us to make that last trip out.
Chris Kraft stopped me in the hallway
and pretty much told me exactly how it was going to be.
- Gene... - Yes, boss?
Want to put the white scarf away?
- Come again? - Lose the throttle jockey act.
I got all the memos I need on Apollo 1 7.
All these great ideas from you and your partner.
You want an extra EVA? You're lucky you even have a mission!
A lot of people think we should quit while we're ahead.
The system's stretched to the limit - we're talking about
cutting the number of Band-Aids in the first-aid kit, six instead of 12.
Enough.
Here's the number one mission rule - tattoo this to your eyelids.
Don't take any chances, just come back alive.
All right, nice and easy, with grace.
As he did with his theatrical productions,
Monsieur Méliès designed every aspect of his film and was quite fanatical.
You must react with spirit and soul!
When things went wrong, things went wrong.
And he would scream.
- Right! - Ladies, you were fine.
- You fire them! - I will. You guys are fired...
When things were not so bad, he was not so bad.
This is how it is when you are working with a genius.
But it was not during the filming that Méliès worked his true magic,
it was later, in the laboratory and the projection room,
where I saw he was up to something incredible.
Something that had never been seen before.
A complete, fantastic story told in one marvellous film.
I don't know, boss. So many cuts, so much glue, I hope it holds.
If it doesn't work, no soup for you.
Yeah, that's all right. It's lousy soup.
How dare you? Is it ready?
Here goes.
There we are, the intrepid voyagers.
Wave to the assembled.
Climb into a projectile that is pushed into the cannon
by so many pretty ladies.
Yes, give us the wave.
Dissolves, superimpositions,
double exposures.
M Méliès was a genius.
Boss? You are a genius.
The cannon, ready to be fired. And boom!
Roger, the clock has started. We have your launch.
Apollo 1 7 has turned midnight into dawn.
Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt
flying through the automated roll programme on the spacecraft
to begin America's, and perhaps all mankind's, final voyage to the moon.
The three men inside the command module America,
with the lunar module Challenger in tow, journey now to the moon.
Most of the world and much of America views Apollo 1 7
as an undertaking either commonplace or wasteful.
Regardless, to be here once again in the presence of such glorious force
aimed at such a heavenly target as the moon
one can only marvel and ask, "How have we done this?
"How have we sent mankind to the moon?"
OK, Houston, as I step down to the surface of Taurus-Littrow...
No one on the planet Earth
saw Gene Cernan first set foot on the moon's surface.
Nor Jack Schmitt.
The Apollo 1 7 TV camera would not be operative
until the lunar rover was deployed and powered up.
When it was, crystal-clear video pictures from the surface of the moon
were transmitted to the world by way of a television camera
controlled from a console in Mission Control by Ed Fendell.
With a lag of six seconds, the time it took for his commands to reach the moon,
and the picture to travel back to Earth,
he was the director of arguably the most unique TV show of all time.
The ratings were nonexistent.
The networks didn't even want to cover the missions except on the morning shows
and an occasional update.
In July of 1 969...
the entire world stopped...
to watch Buzz and Neil and the one giant leap.
The picture was so bad, a lot of people couldn't even make it out.
1 2, the colour camera went out so there was no TV.
No matter what they tried.
Apollo 13...
was a news story unlike any other in history.
But it takes nearly another year
for Al Shepard to practise his golf swing.
1 5 and 1 6 had the rover and the colour camera.
But by this time...
no one was watching.
They'd moved on to other things.
Colour television from the moon...
took a few moments of their time.
Nothing more.
OK, let's see. Where am I?
In a geologist's paradise, if I ever saw one.
I just snuck a quick peek at the drill and it does work.
And I just took time out for a bit of water.
- What's that? - Must be Ron.
Houston, tell Evans he's got his VHF on.
Oh, no, you won't believe it.
I did it again? Hit the wrong button on the gravimeter?
No, there goes the fender.
I caught it with my hammer. Oh, shoot.
Oh, golly. Oh, boy.
I couldn't stop myself before the damage was done.
Oh, boy. I'm gonna deploy this package here.
We're gonna have to stop here. Let me try to get that fender back on.
Otherwise the dust will cover everything.
- Jack, Is the tape under my seat? - Yeah.
Oh, man. Hey, Jack.
Just stop. You owe yourself 30 seconds
to take a look up over the south massif and look at the Earth.
You seen one Earth, you've seen them all.
That's the difference between us. Every spare second that I had
I was trying to take in everything that I was doing,
everything that I was seeing.
I'm trying to grab another look up at the Earth...
focusing on this great adventure
that I was living in time, in space, in reality.
I mean, there it was up there surrounded by...
by nothingness.
The darkest black imaginable.
I could see that it was night-time in England and lunch time in Texas
with just a casual glance,
as though I were a passenger on a time machine
with a big picture window in it,
just looking out.
I just couldn't get enough of it.
I was looking at the rocks. Our time was so limited
and the best instrument in the world for scientific observation
is a pair of trained eyes and an educated brain to process information.
There we were. This fantastic field site.
I was looking at the rocks.
I mean, when you can see the layers of geologic history...
that's what I was there for.
After problems with the gravimeter
and the Lunar Surface Experiment Package
and a time-consuming fix to the broken fender of the rover,
Cernan and Schmitt were allowed to travel only half as far
as their first EVA had originally called for.
By the time they were back inside Challenger and repressurised to five psi,
the two moonwalkers had been outside for seven hours and 1 2 minutes,
almost three times longer
than all of Armstrong and Aldrin's exploration of the Sea of Tranquillity.
And Apollo 1 7 had two more moonwalks to go.
Rehearsing.
Here we are. We've touched down on the moon.
Out, everyone! Out quickly!
You're excited, can't believe where you are!
It's amazing. Look at this amazing scene.
- The mountains. - Out they come. Out.
Now, over here. Raise your arm.
Raise up. Then stop the grinder.
- Stop the grinder. - Can we move this?
One, two, three.
- Quickly, quickly. - Don't move.
It'll be faster, boss. Don't worry.
All right, so raise your arm. Raise your arm. Good.
- Don't move. Keep up your arms. - And then start the grinder.
Out of the way. We want to see the Earth.
- We're turning again. - We want the Earth rising,
slowly... and let drop the mountains.
Lower the first range.
No, first the Earth begins to rise.
- First the Earth rises! - Then let drop the mountains.
Then the mountains lower. Earth rise, mountains lower.
It'll be perfect tomorrow, boss. I guarantee.
And ready, volcano?
Volcano!
Boom!
The volcano should be a little farther offstage. Can you get it?
You're doing a lousy job and bitching for nothing.
We'll do that. Now get up. Stretch.
Here they are. No, they will be, boss.
I promise. I guarantee it.
- They will be there. - We cover ourselves with the blankets.
Special blankets from the moon.
Lay on the moon and dream of the star maidens.
Out come the star maidens.
When the sun... is over the roof, we'll shoot the scene.
If we have the sun, boss.
Please, Lord, give us the sun.
Good morning, Challenger. We have some music for you
from the old folks of the LMP at Cal Tech.
Being the commander had some advantages. One is driving the rover.
Every time I'd go down a hill, I'd put Jack on the downslope side.
Not once did Gene-o drive with me on the uphill side.
He usually only had three wheels on the surface
and me feeling like we were gonna tip over any minute.
Good eye.
For the second EVA
Cernan and Schmitt were well rested
and had the time-consuming chores behind them.
I think we've got another one.
With ten stations scheduled,
the pair drove over five miles from the safety of Challenger
determined to do as much work in the allotted time
as was humanly possible.
While the astronauts were in transit on the moon
there was no television signal.
In Houston, Flight Director Gerry Griffin
managed the activities through the voice contact of CAPCOM Bob Parker,
who tried to keep the astronauts on schedule.
Roll and pitch should be fairly flat.
The F-stop for the 500-millimetre should be the same as for the 70.
Gene, take some shots of those massifs... if they look interesting.
"If they look interesting"? What kind of thing is that to say?
Bob, up frame count 36 is the outcrop where the boulders
at the top of the south massif...
Here's something different.
It's a chunk of yellow-brown rock that has several spots behind it.
To find a sample with such a vivid colour on the moon
would be evidence of volcanic activity,
the one-time presence of water or oxygen.
It was exactly the kind of find
you'd want to make on a place like the moon.
Of course, it turned out it was too good to be true.
Oh, no. What is that? That's a reflection.
That really fooled me.
It's a reflection off the mylar on the rover.
I thought I had something there. Crazy.
Well, what the heck? I'll sample it anyway.
So 32 Easy is just another small fragment.
"Just another small fragment."
Well, you can bet that gave the guys in the Geology Backroom a jolt.
Seeing as how Jack was one of us, we never thought he would lie to us.
The hallmark of any geologist is impeccable integrity.
But that little episode...
that had us going for a bit.
So what other things can reflect off the rover up there?
Does it have tail-lights?
- Hubcaps. - Maybe he left the parking lights on.
Don't do that to us again, Jack.
OK, Shorty is clearly a darker-rimmed crater.
The inner wall is quite blocky except for the western portion of it.
The floor is hummocky,
as we thought it was in the Apollo 15 photographs.
If it had been a perfect world for us geologists,
Jack would've had his own TV camera.
just for the ground science team.
Come on, Gene. Turn on the TV.
The central peak, if you wil, or the central mound
is very blocky, very jagged.
And the impression I have of the other mounds in the bottom
is that they look like slump masses that may have...
- There it is. - We got it!
Thanks, Gene. Now get out of the way.
- Come on, Cernan. Move! - Crater rim, Jack,
grab us a sample of that sucker.
A very large boulder of very intensely fractured rock
right on the rim.
Where on the rim? We can't...
It looks like a finely vesicular version of our clinopyroxene gabbro.
It's obviously crystalline. Do you have TV?
- Yes! - Get out of the way!
We have TV. And you might brush the lens for us
before you move out of the way.
I'm gonna take a quick pan while I'm waiting for you.
OK, OK.
There is orange soil.
There is orange soil here.
I knew by the tone of Jack's voice
that this orange soil was the real thing.
We just wanted to see it on the TV.
It's all over. It's orange.
- He said it's all over the place. - Zoom in on it!
- Take a good look around. - Bring it to the camera.
Get the sunlight at the right angle.
- It is. I can see it from here. - It's orange.
Let me pull my visor up.
It's still orange!
Cernan. I'm gonna have to dig a trench here, Houston.
Boy, it's almost the same colour as the LMP decal on my camera.
How can there be oxidised soil here?
It looks just like oxidised desert soil. That's exactly right.
You know, that orange, it runs in a line, Gene-o.
- Right along the rim crest. - Circumferential?
If there was anything that looked like a fumarole alteration this is it.
That's it! That's it! That's the volcanic event!
The bad news is that the orange
was not a fumarole alteration, nor oxidised.
These were perfectly normal preliminary assumptions to make
about an unexamined sample
but it turned out that it was orange volcanic glass
from a fire fountain that happened 3.5 billion years ago.
But that did not diminish anyone's excitement about that find,
or, frankly, its importance.
I think Jack and I did as solid an EVA as anyone could have
on that second time out.
Some of the best work ever done in all of Apollo.
There was one thing I really wanted to do out there, though.
It had to do with my daughter, Tracy.
Did he promise to bring you anything?
Well, I asked him to bring a rock back from the moon.
He said if he could, he would bring me one back.
And if he couldn't, he'd bring me a moonbeam.
- A what? - A moonbeam.
A moonbeam.
He's either pullin' your leg or you're pullin' mine.
That's what he said.
Before my father walked on the moon,
he told me he was gonna do something very special up there.
He said he was going to carve my initials in the lunar dust,
making me the only little girl with her name on the moon.
And that it would last for thousands and thousands of years.
Just like his footprints is what he'd say.
Of course, I was nine years old at the time
and I had very little concept of what he was talking about.
The moon is five times the size of the continent of Africa.
In all, the Apollo missions spent more than 1 2 days on its surface
but less than three and a half days actually exploring its mysteries.
In the 7 5 hours Challenger sat in the Taurus-Littrow Valley
the crew spent 24 hours of them in scheduled rest periods.
I didn't do much sleeping on the moon. No. No more than catnaps, really.
I was waking up every few hours.
I just couldn't do it.
Not that I sat up writing poetry or anything
but the knowledge of being where I was kept me up and looking around.
Not because I was scared or anything,
it was just that I was actually trying to do something so fantastic
it made it impossible.
Jack, he slept like a baby
with the sweetest dreams you can imagine, I suppose.
Mankind's final day on the moon
came with the Earth's face having waned by 1 5 per cent.
The day would bring the last seven hours of human footfall
on the face of another world.
The longer you stay on the moon, minute by minute,
the better the chances are for something to go wrong.
Now I will tell you, without hesitation,
even with there being nothing wrong at all,
that last EVA was as anxious a time as I ever spent in NASA.
- That's affirmed. - OK, here comes the hatch.
- I can see daylight. - OK, the hatch is open.
I tell you, with a stiff suit - I'm still at 4.5 psi.
OK, but I am out here on the porch.
OK, I'm going down the ladder.
Godspeed, the crew of Apollo 1 7.
I remember my visit to Mission Control quite vividly
for it was the day I saw the impossible.
I knew the Americans had walked on the moon.
I had seen the pictures. But the immediacy
of actually being there in Houston at the same time
did something to my consciousness that had not yet happened.
It came at a moment when the man operating the camera
turned it toward the Earth, and he zoomed in very slowly.
The picture was... It was so good.
I could actually make out the oceans and the continents and the clouds.
It suddenly hit me...
that we were looking at ourselves.
It was as if our own eyes were on the moon
and somehow we could turn them around
and look back down and see everything we have,
everything we know, everything we are, all at the same time.
I wanted to run outside and wave at the moon
and run back inside, see if I could see myself.
Turning Point Rock was so named
because it was the station farthest away from the Challenger
on the final EVA of Apollo 1 7.
What looked like in orbit to be one huge boulder
that had skidded to a stop in the valley
was, in fact, five different boulders, each the size of a house.
That's where I should have done it.
I thought later on, "If I had just put Tracy's initials on a boulder
"that would have been an incredible picture."
You know? "TDC" in the lunar dust up there for the rest of time
but hell, I was so tired and so busy the opportunity got away from me.
I don't think... I can get to the top.
I just gotta get to a place where I can get a pan from.
OK, I think I'll save some water.
All right.
Back on intermediate.
That cools you off real fast.
There's Challenger.
Holy smoley!
The lunar module was three miles away and that was our home.
We were up on the side of the north massif working.
Just two lunchbox-totin' Joes.
You can talk all you want about going to the moon,
living and working on the moon.
I can tell you, I already did that.
I had a house up there. I had a job.
I lived up there for three days.
You know, Jack, when we finish with station eight
we will have covered this whole valley.
That was the idea.
But I didn't think we'd ever really get to that far corner, but we are going to make it.
Son of a gun, the commander just fell down.
- You OK? - Yeah, Commander's OK.
When you're tired, and almost finished,
and you think everything is going perfectly and you got it made,
that's when something terrible can happen.
That's when disaster can strike.
Another savage attacks but - poof!
And they escape the Selenites
and are about to leave the lunar surface.
Danger.
Will they survive? Yes! They are led by Professor Barbenfouillis.
Monsieur Méliès was on the precipice of celebrity and greatness
as well as getting very, very rich.
Poof! A savage of the other world disappears.
Poof again. Poof! And again.
As was his due, he had created Le Voyage Dans La Lune.
But then, it all came crashing down.
But they're on their way home and splash in the ocean.
It goes deep, deep, deep, deep, and they come up.
Yes, they come up to the surface
and the navy brings them to safe harbour.
I'm going to take my movie in America,
make a hundred prints of it, take them to New York
book a theatre and let words of my films spread
across this huge, rich land.
I will make a fortune out of this.
Poor Monsieur Méliès.
He did not know that Le Voyage Dans La Lune
was already playing in America.
And he was not ever going to see a penny from it.
Agents of the American genius and thief Monsieur Thomas Edison
had seen the film in London.
They bribed the theatre owner,
took the film into a lab
and made copy after copy after copy of it.
The film was a sensation in America.
A fortune was made off its exhibition.
None of it - not a penny -
going into the pockets of Monsieur Georges Méliès.
Within a few years... he was broke.
- You should have TV. - We're gettin' TV.
- You getting it? - We've got TV.
Well, let me take a look.
With the final EVA nearly completed,
Gene Cernan drove the rover a few hundred feet away
to its final resting place,
a parking spot where it still sits today.
He would need the clamps holding together the fender
for inside the LEM during ascent.
A good fender, he took back as a souvenir.
Pressed for time, and with a long walk back to the landing site,
the commander of Apollo 1 7 stole the luxury
of a last look at his home on the moon...
then performed one last, very personal task.
With Mission Control reminding him time was running out,
Jack Schmitt hurried to prepare the last bags of priceless lunar samples
for the long transport to Earth.
With the clock ticking and his life support diminishing with every breath
the only scientist to ever walk on the moon came to a melancholy realisation -
his time there was over.
We need you in the LEM in one-five minutes, 15 minutes
- because of oxygen restraints. - I copy that.
I don't need my hammer any more.
Tell them to move it along.
What we want you to do is dust and get in.
We got one-four minutes.
- Let me throw the hammer. - OK.
Let me throw the hammer, please.
It's all yours. You deserve it. You're a geologist.
You oughta be able to be the hammer thrower.
- You ready? - Go ahead. Don't hit the LEM.
Bob, this is Gene, and I'm alone on the surface.
That's why I'm the last man to walk on the moon.
Jack was already inside Challenger so it was just me out there.
That last footprint on the moon, check it out.
It just happens to be my boot size.
And as I take man's last step from the surface
back home, for now,
but we believe not too long into the future.
I'd just like to say what 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.
Godspeed, the crew of Apollo 1 7.
- Descent engine override. Logic in. - OK.
Rate scale - 25 degrees per second.
- 25. - Attitude translation: four jets.
- Four jets on. - Balance couple on.
Take your final look at the valley at Taurus-Littrow.
The TV camera on the rover
was broadcasting live pictures of Challenger's liftoff from the moon
making Ed Fendell the most nervous man in all of NASA.
The camera on Apollo 1 5 wouldn't tilt up to follow the ascent
and its commands for keeping Apollo 1 6 were too slow.
Now with one last chance to televise the complete event,
the pressure was on to pan and zoom the camera
several seconds before liftoff.
Otherwise the world would never see
a perfect TV picture of Apollo leaving the moon.
- Engine arm is ascent. - Engine arm is ascent.
- I'm going to hit the PRO. - Roger.
99.
Proceed.
Three, two, one.
Ignition.
With a precision emblematic of its near flawless mission,
Apollo 1 7 embarked from the moon for the sixth and final time
in the history of mankind.
The exploration of another world was successfully and safely completed
thanks to the efforts and attention of those on Earth
who could only look on as vicarious participants
as the fantastic voyages came to a bittersweet end.
When we were back in the command module,
President Nixon sent a message
congratulating us on the last exploration of the moon in this century.
Boy, that made me mad because we were just getting good at it.
The hardware had been proven, was getting even better
and yet we have not been back to the moon since 1972.
We should've continued right along.
The only reason we stopped going to the moon was politics.
Sending men to the moon is dangerous.
It's also expensive. It's hard to do.
But we did it at the cost of more than just money.
If you have the time, I can list the names
of a couple of hundred thousand people
who gave of themselves to make it happen,
along with the names of dozens of people who gave their lives.
Understand that the moon is what the Earth once was
before the ancient craters were erased by the wind and the rain
and the geologic forces.
As such, the moon is a time machine that can take us back
and tell us what our home was once like - what it was made out of
and how it came to be that we're all living here.
I wish I had been living up there on the moon these past 25 years
wandering around with my hammer and a sack
and a Thermos or two of coffee.
I'm very glad to have been alive when we went to the moon.
I am of the generation that witnessed it,
that actually saw it live on television.
And what we saw on television
from the forbidding and desolate surface of the moon
was our own world,
both beautiful and troubled.
Standing on the moon, looking up at the Earth,
you see that the promise and potential of our world
is as obvious as it is magnificent.
And for the people who live on that green and blue ball,
there is no difficulty they cannot overcome,
no solution they cannot grasp,
no distance that they cannot travel.
Me standing in the valley of Taurus-Littrow is proof of that.
What we learned about the moon
is not nearly as important as our going there.
Apollo 8...
witnesses to the first earthrise in the consciousness of Man.
Apollo 1 7, Gene Cernan takes that remarkable photo
of Jack Schmitt standing on the moon
with the Earth over his shoulder.
See, that's why we went to the moon - to take those pictures.
We didn't go there to conquer it or claim it
or simply beat the Russians to it.
Sure, we wanted to find out what the moon was made of,
to satisfy questions of science
that have plagued us since the dawn of Man.
But more than anything else we went to the moon
to see if we could make the journey
because if we can do that -
if we can voyage from the Earth to the moon -
then there's hope for all of us,
because we can do anything.
William Bradford speaking in 1630
of the founding of the Plymouth Bay colony
said that all great and honorable actions
are accompanied with great difficulty.
And both must be enterprised and overcome with admirable courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything
it is that Man, in his quest for knowledge and progress
is determined and cannot be deterred.
The exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not.
We need to be a part of it. We need to lead it.
For the eyes of the world now look into space,
to the moon and to the planets beyond.
Our leadership in science and industry our hopes for peace and security,
our obligations to ourselves as well as others,
all require us to make this effort to solve these mysteries.
To solve them for the good of all men.
There is no strife, no prejudice,
no national conflict in outer space as yet.
Its hazards are hostile to us all.
Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind.
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.
Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept
one we are unwilling to postpone
and one we intend to win.