Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott and the Lunar Rover with a view up
Hadley Rille in the background. Credit: NASA via Retro Space Images
countdown entered its final seconds,
the glare of the Sun was so intense
that Scott had to shield his eyes, just
to read the instrument panel in front
of him. Precisely on time, at 9:34 a.m.
EDT, the five F-1 engines of the Saturn
V’s first stage came to life with a
muffled roar. “You just hang there,”
Irwin wrote. “Then you sense a little
motion, a little vibration and you start
to move. Once you realise you are
moving, there is a complete release
of tensions. Slowly, slowly, then faster
and faster; you feel all that power
underneath you.”
Four days later, after crossing
the vast, 240,000-mile (370,000 km)
cislunar gulf, Apollo 15 slipped into
orbit around the Moon. Scott and
Irwin, aboard the lunar module Falcon, undocked from Worden, in the
command module Endeavour, and
began their descent towards the
surface.
Moving in a sweeping arc towards
the Apennines, at an altitude of 4
miles (6.4 km), Scott began to discern the long, meandering channel
of Hadley Rille. The terrain was less
sharply defined than he had anticipated on the basis of simulations,
yet he was able to find four familiar
craters: Matthew, Mark, Luke and
Index—the latter of which they had
used in landmark sightings from orbit.
(The name “Index” was deliberately
chosen instead of “John” in order to
stave off complaints from the notorious atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair,
whose criticism of overtly religious
symbolic gestures on missions had
scalded NASA during the December
1968 mission of Apollo 8.)
Dropping through a gap in the
lunar mountains, Scott suddenly
had the surreal feeling that he was
“floating” with strange slowness
towards his landing site. “No amount
of simulation training,” he wrote in
his memoir, Two Sides of the Moon,
“had been able to replicate the
to both their left and right as they
threaded their way towards Hadley.
“It made us feel,” he added, “almost
as if we should pull our feet up to
prevent scraping them along the top
of the range.”
As they continued to descend,
Falcon’s computer transitioned to
the so-called “Program 66”, enabling
Scott to fly manually.
“Dave didn’t want me looking at
the surface at all,” Irwin wrote. “He
wanted me to concentrate on the
information on the computer and
other instruments. He wanted to be
certain that he had instant informa-
“No amount of simulation training had been
able to replicate the view we saw out of our
windows as we passed by the steep slopes of
the majestic lunar Apennine Mountains.”
view we saw out of our windows as
we passed by the steep slopes of the
majestic lunar Apennine Mountains.”
In the simulator, they “flew” a television camera towards a small, relatively flat patch of plaster-of-Paris;
now, doing it for real, they drifted
between the astonishing 16,400-foot
(5,000-meter) peaks of the mountains
tion relayed to him. He was going
to pick out the landmarks. But Dave
couldn’t identify the landmarks; the
features on the real surface didn’t
look like the ones we had trained
with.”
Scott could see Hadley Rille,
though, and used that long gouge
as his marker, but was worried that
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