_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [81]
In April of 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts John Young, Charles Duke, and Ken Mattingly flew to the moon. Young and Duke left Mattingly in lunar orbit babysitting their command ship, Casper, while they rode their lunar module, Orion, to a wide plateau on the edge of the Descartes Mountains. The second moon buggy took the two astronauts through massive boulder fields, around and through craters, and through some chemical rocks with aluminum basalts. They came home with 213 pounds of samples for happy geologists.
Late that year, on December 7, 1972, shortly after midnight on a Cape Canaveral coast mantled in darkness, people within fifty miles thought the sun had come up. What appeared to be daylight flared along the beach, spreading outward as the Saturn V rocket with Apollo 17 went to full thrust. It rose atop its own blazing fireball, leaving a light that was seen five hundred miles away atop Stone Mountain in Georgia.
Astronauts Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ron Evans were on their way to what would be the last landing on the lunar landscape for half a century. Gene Cernan had traveled the same path to the moon before on Apollo 10. He and Jack Schmitt, the only geologist to sink his pike into the lunar crust, landed in the Littrow Valley of the Taurus mountain region and capped the most incredible series of expeditions in the history of the human race. They spent three days on the lunar surface, including more than twenty-two hours in a trio of stunning geological journeys, riding their moon buggy to fields of enormous boulders, to the slopes of steeply rising mountains, and along the edges of precipitous gorges from where they stood in awe of the chasms torn in the moon’s surface. They managed to load 243 pounds of rocks and soil aboard their lander, conduct dozens of scientific experiments, and strip away many of the moon’s secrets that had confounded people on Earth for centuries. The Apollo 17 finds have kept scientists of many countries intensely busy well into the twenty-first century.
What emerged from Apollo is a picture of a moon that was born in searing heat, lived a brief life of boiling lava and shattering collisions, then died geologically in an early, primitive stage. It came into being some 4.6 billion years ago, when great masses of gaseous matter called the solar nebula began condensing to form the sun, Earth, and other planets and moons of the solar system. The nebula first condensed into chunks of space debris—from small pebbles to miles-wide boulders—that crashed together and fused to form celestial bodies. This compacting of debris generated intense heat that turned the lunar surface into a sea of molten lava, to a depth of several miles. The cooled lava became the moon’s primitive crust. Debris left over from the creation of the solar system continued to bombard the moon, carving out giant craters and valleys and forming mountains by piling up large piles of rocks.
The young Earth apparently underwent the same period of meteorite bombardment and volcanism that the moon did for about a half billion years. Then the histories of the two bodies diverged. The weak lunar gravity could not prevent volcanic gases from escaping into space, and the moon became a dead body where life could not exist. But the larger Earth, with strong magnetic and gravity fields, held onto its volcanic gases, and they formed an atmosphere and oceans, creating conditions for the development of life.
America’s lunar landings learned more about the moon and our solar system than humans had