Forty years ago this month, humanity left its last footprints on the surface of another celestial body. Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt guided their lunar module Challenger down into a beautiful valley in the Taurus Mountains, on the edge of the Moon's Serenitatis basin, just south of the ancient crater Littrow. The spectacular landing site had been selected in February 1972, having been extensively photographed from orbit during the Apollo 15 mission, and was expected to yield rock and soil samples from before the tumultuous Mare Imbrium impact event to better understand the peculiar nature of the valley floor, whose intrinsic darkness looked strangely out of place amidst the light-coloured surrounding highlands. When they visited ‘Taurus-Littrow', Cernan and Schmitt achieved the exalted goal of setting foot on an alien world…and left a gaggle of disappointed fellow astronauts back on Earth. In this first installment of an Apollo 17 commemorative feature, AmericaSpace will explore the twists and turns of good luck and bad luck which decided who would fly Apollo 17…and who would not.
To understand the crew-selection process in that long-gone era, the central character was Deke Slayton, an astronaut himself and since the early 1960s served as NASA's head of Flight Crew Operations. In the early Apollo period, he developed a three-flight rotation system, whereby the astronauts on the backup team of a given mission would fly as the prime crew three missions later. Hence, the Apollo 9 backup crew of Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Al Bean were recycled as the Apollo 12 prime crew. It would make sense to suppose that the Apollo 14 backup crew—Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Joe Engle—would thus have been in pole position to take the Apollo 17 seats. Had NASA not been required by Congress to cancel its last two Apollo landing missions (18 and 19) in September 1970, it is quite possible that this is what would have happened.
But there was a problem. On the Apollo 15 backup crew—and therefore probably pointed toward the Apollo 18 prime crew—was NASA's only professional geologist-astronaut, Dr Jack Schmitt, and the space agency had long been under intense pressure from the National Academy of Sciences to fly him to the Moon. Since his selection by NASA in 1965, Schmitt had worked extensively on Apollo, covering the lunar surface experiments packages, the lunar module descent stage systems, and other elements of cargo and tools. He single-handedly came up with a lunar-orbit science plan for Bill Anders to follow on Apollo 8 and was closely involved in the geological training of subsequent landing crews. It paid off. In March 1970, Schmitt's name was formally announced on the Apollo 15 backup crew. Joining him would be Dick Gordon as his commander (and lunar-landing buddy) and command module pilot Vance Brand.
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