The Perfect Mission

"Hey, there it is!" shouted one of U.S.S. Ticonderoga's sailors. Barely four miles off the bow of the big carrier, Apollo 17's command ship America emerged from the puffy clouds, drifting easily under its three billowing orange-and-white parachutes. Then, while a television-equipped helicopter hovered almost directly above it to give the world its first bird's-eye view of a splashdown, the command ship dropped into the gently rolling Pacific. Less than an hour later, Apollo 17's three astronauts--Navymen Gene Cernan and Ron Evans and slightly seasick Civilian Geologist Jack Schmitt--were safely aboard the carrier. "By golly," said Cernan, "it's good to be home."

It was a fitting finish to what the director of the Apollo program, Rocco Petrone, called "the most perfect mission," and to America's remarkably successful manned assault on the moon. Between the December 1968 mission of Apollo 8 and the final flight of Apollo 17, a dozen U.S. astronauts had walked on the lunar surface and--as President Nixon noted last week--"of 24 men sent to circle the moon or to stand upon it...24 men returned to earth alive and well." Said Christopher Kraft, director of Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center: "Apollo was the greatest engineering feat of all our lives."

Orange Soil. Scientists shared the enthusiasm of NASA'S engineers. In Houston, they eagerly anticipated examining Apollo 17's 250 lbs. of moon rocks, 3,000 photographs and reams of scientific data. Every sign pointed to the likelihood that the Taurus-Littrow landing site had fulfilled the greatest hopes of the scientists who selected it, that the findings in the area would help fill important gaps in the lunar chronology. Apollo's cargo of rocks includes fragmented specimens called breccias that may have been formed far back in the moon's history, perhaps as long as 4 billion years ago. Even more important, perhaps, are the intriguing orange soil samples scraped up by Schmitt and Cernan at Shorty Crater. The soil may well provide evidence of relatively recent volcanic activity on the moon and could be the youngest lunar material ever brought back to earth. Said NASA Geologist Farouk El Baz: "The Apollo 17 site should give us clues to the real end of the lunar time scale, the time scale that is closest to us."

On Apollo's three-day homeward voyage, the astronauts had exceptionally smooth sailing. "America has found some fair winds and following seas," said Cernan after the main engine had successfully lifted the command ship out of lunar orbit. As the spacecraft emerged from behind the moon for the last time, the astronauts aimed their TV camera at the surface below and sent back the first live pictures of features on the backside that are invisible from earth, including the giant Tsiolkovsky Crater (named for the Russian space pioneer). Next day, some 180,000 miles from earth, Command Module Pilot Evans, who had been out of the spotlight while Cernan and Schmitt walked the moon, took the stage for himself. After emerging from America's hatch, he crawled back, hand over hand, along the side of the ship to the service module's scientific-equipment bay. There he retrieved film that had been shot by automatic cameras while he was orbiting the moon. "Hey, this is great," said Evans, who waved happily to the TV camera during his 43-minute space walk. "Talk about being a spaceman. This is it."

On the eve of their splashdown, the astronauts held a press conference in space, answering newsmen's questions , relayed to them by Mission Control. How did they feel about the decision to end the Apollo program and manned exploration of the moon? Cernan was outspoken, calling it "an abnormal restraint of man's intellect at this point in time." Next day, however, Richard Nixon had some reassuring words for the astronauts and NASA: "The making of space history will continue, and this nation means to play a major role in its making...The more we look back the more we are reminded that our thrust has been forward and that our place is among the heavens where our dreams precede us, and where, in time, we shall surely follow."

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