View from lunar orbit looking towards the Moon’s South pole. Credit: NASA via Retro Space Images
At first, Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton opposed the
idea, on the grounds that it would
waste valuable oxygen, but Scott
fiercely argued his case and eventually won approval.
To conduct this half-hour “SEVA”,
Scott pulled a balaclava-like visor over his clear bubble helmet,
clambered onto the ascent engine
cover and removed the top hatch.
It was, he wrote, “rather as if I was in
the conning tower of a submarine
or the turret of a tank”. Meanwhile,
Irwin shaded the instrument panel
from the unfiltered lunar sunlight and
arranged Scott’s oxygen hoses and
communications cables to enable
him to stand upright. “He offered me
a chance to look out,” Irwin wrote,
“but my umbilicals weren’t long
enough and I didn’t want to take the
time to rearrange them.”
In the weak gravity, Scott found
that he could easily support himself
in the hatch on his elbows…and
beheld the stunning view of the
brown-and-tan Apennines, tinged by
the intense golden sunlight, against
black sky. Irwin passed up a bearing
indicator and a large orientation
map, which Scott used to shoot a
couple of dozen interconnected stereo pictures of the landing site now
officially known as “Hadley Base”.
As his eyes adapted, and his mind
connected it with months spent examining Lunar Orbiter geology maps,
Scott began reeling off the landmarks. There was Pluton and Icarus
and Chain and Side—intriguing craters in an area known as the “North
useful experience, for a lot of reasons,” Scott later explained for the
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. “One
of our problems at Hadley was that
the resolution of the Lunar Orbiter
photography was only 60 feet (18
meters), so they couldn’t prepare
a detailed map. The maps we had
were best guesses and we had the
radar people tell us before the flight
that there were boulder fields...all
over the base of Hadley Delta. So
another reason for the stand-up
EVA was to look and see if we could
drive the Rover, because if there
were boulder fields down there, and
nobody could prove there were no
boulder fields, it changed the whole
picture.”
The view set his mind at ease; it
looked totally unhostile and contradicted pre-flight fears. The “trafficability” as Scott put it, would be
excellent.
Back inside Falcon, acutely aware
that they were the only inhabitants of Earth ever to visit this barren
place, the astronauts removed their
suits and set about preparing their
evening meal and getting ready for
sleep. “Tomato soup was big on the
menu, as I recall,” Scott wrote. “There
was no hot-water supply in the LM, as
there was in the command module,
so all our meals on the lunar surface
were served cold and we soon
discovered that there was not really
enough to eat, either.”
In the coming weeks, they would
recommend that more food be carried on Apollo 16 and 17, for walking
on the Moon required huge reserves
of energy and stamina and would
prove to be hungry work.
“Tomato soup was big on the menu…There was
no hot-water supply in the LM…so all our meals
on the lunar surface were served cold”
Complex”—and on the lower slopes
of Mount Hadley Delta was the vast,
yawning pit of St. George Crater.
One particularly prominent, rocky
landmark which they had dubbed
“Silver Spur” in honor of their geology
professor, Lee Silver, showed clear
evidence of stratigraphy in its flanks.
“The SEVA was a marvelous and
Irwin, too, remembered Apollo
15’s staple of soups. “Eating them
required some acrobatics,” he wrote.
“They were…in plastic bags, but
they had a Teflon seal that you had
to peel off. We added water to the
soups, then very carefully pulled the
tab to open them up. If you opened
them slowly, invariably the soup
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