Charles Duke
On 16 April 1972, Apollo 16 left Earth and headed to the Moon. The mission’s Lunar Module pilot, Charles Duke, recounts the day his astronaut boots touched lunar soil
Could you tell us a bit more about how you went about choosing the landing site without crashing?
There is no dark side of the Moon; it’s actually the far side. It rotates once every 28 days. There are two weeks of daylight and two weeks of night on every spot of the lunar surface. Apollo 16 landed with a low Sun angle to give us definition of the lunar surface. If you tried to land at high noon, it was all washed out by sunlight, which meant that you couldn’t see any of the craters and you couldn’t see any of the elevation changes. The landing site was therefore chosen at a very low Sun angle, so that we had all of the shadows to the west. It was early morning during the lunar day at the Apollo landing site, which was called Descartes. We got some definition of the landing site, which meant that we didn’t crash or fall into a big crater. The further east you go, the more the backside of the Moon was in darkness. We landed just a little east and a little south of the centre and could see that half of the backside of the Moon was in sunlight.
What did you see as you entered lunar orbit?
As we entered the shadowed portion of the Moon, you got this eerie feeling because the Sun hadn’t been shining on this region for a few days. The feeling was so unreal that I was left thinking: ‘Well, I hope our tracking is right!’ You’re going into orbit at 60 by 70 miles [97 by 113 kilometres] above the Moon. And so we burned to slow down and manoeuvre into orbit. At this point, the computer told us that we were out of contact with Earth and that we had loss of signal. Then, all of a sudden there was the sunrise – it was the most dramatic sunrise I’ve ever seen. In Earth orbit, you see the Sun’s glow on the horizon, or the planet’s atmosphere, and it gets brighter and brighter. The Moon is different though – there’s instant sunlight, with long shadows on the lunar surface. The far side of the Moon was very rough back there. I would not have wanted to land on the backside of the Moon.
The manoeuvre into orbit lasted around two minutes and 41 seconds. During that time, we burned about 2 million kilograms of fuel. We took pictures of Earth after we left our planet over Australia around an hour after liftoff. Earth was like a jewel suspended in the blackness of space. The Sun shines all of the time on the way to the Moon, but the stars are never visible. It’s ve
