![]() ![]() What he saw inspired him to grab the only Hasselblad that wasn't stowed and snap a picture - actually four pictures, no more than a minute apart, changing the exposure after the first one. Forty years later the journey that lives most intensely for them was more about leaving the Earth than going to the moon.Īt five hours and a few minutes into the flight of Apollo 17 one of the crewmen looked out the window. It was a blue-green beacon in a vast black cosmos, beguiling them on a cellular level, getting smaller by the minute. If you talk to any of the lunar travelers today - eighteen of them are still alive - they will talk most about and remember best the stolen moments of watching their home world shrink behind them. When political pressure bumped Engle in favor of Schmitt on Apollo 17 a very odd couple was sent to the moon.īut they couldn't help it, none of them. They were generally regarded as dorks by the pilot astronauts, Right Stuff bravos like Cernan and Engle who between them had flown a hundred different aircraft, from helicopters to rocket planes, landing on everything from heaving carriers to empty deserts. Six of them were selected amid great nerdy fanfare in 1965 but none had been assigned to a mission until Schmitt got a seat on the very last planned flight. The Lunar Module Pilot on that crew was Jack Schmitt, a Harvard-trained geologist who was a scientist-astronaut. Then by established NASA policy they rotated together to prime crew status on Apollo 17.īut then Congress canceled the funding for Apollo 18, which also had a crew that trained together for months. For Apollo 17 Cernan had chosen Joe Engle, a former X-15 pilot, and the two trained for months as the backups for Apollo 14. All had picked rookies, loyal sidekicks they felt comfortable with and confident in. On the five previous Apollo missions the commanders, all space veterans, were allowed to choose who would land with them on an alien world. All three have claimed that they took the famous Blue Marble Shot. The three men atop the rocket were Eugene Cernan, the Commander of Apollo 17 Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, the Lunar Module Pilot who would accompany Cernan down to the surface if all went well and Ron Evans, the Command Module Pilot who would remain in lunar orbit, keeping their return ship running while his crewmates did the glamorous exploring. Their trajectories were determined by the landing sites they were scouting or targeting, and those were mainly on the eastern face of the moon as seen from Earth. Most of the men who flew lunar missions saw neither a full Earth nor a full moon both heavenly bodies were partly in shadow - complementary shadows, like lovers walking past a streetlamp - the entire flight. In order to see our planet as a fully illuminated globe you need to pass through a point between it and the sun, which is a narrower window than you might think if you're traveling at 20,000 miles an hour. But only the last three saw a full Earth. They were the three-man crews of the nine Apollo missions that traveled to the moon between 19, six of which landed there successfully (three men went twice). You can't see the Earth as a globe unless you get at least twenty thousand miles away from it, and only 24 humans ever went that far into outer space. It was the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth and the only one ever snapped by a human being. ![]()
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