Apollo 14: Six Tries to Dock, a Precise Landing and a Cart on the Moon

Apollo 14 was the eighth crewed Apollo mission and the third to land on the Moon. It lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on January 31, 1971, with commander Alan B. Shepard — the first American in space — command module pilot Stuart A. Roosa, and lunar module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell.

It flew in the shadow of Apollo 13. After that mission, nothing was taken for granted, and a great deal of work went into reprogramming software and understanding what had gone wrong.

Six tries to dock

Trouble came early. The command module Kitty Hawk could not achieve a “hard dock” with the lunar module Antares. Crew and Mission Control tried again, and again — six attempts over about two hours — before a hard dock was achieved. “We got a hard dock, Houston,” the crew radioed. Soon after came the line that gave NASA’s film of the mission its title: “This is really a wild place up here.”

A precise landing

On February 5, 1971, Antares set down in the hilly uplands of the Fra Mauro region — the most precise lunar landing yet. “We landed on a slope,” the crew reported, “but other than that, we’re in great shape. Right on the landing site.” Moments later, as the first man stepped off the ladder, came the remark: “Not bad for an old man.”

Science on the surface

Shepard and Mitchell spent 33.5 hours on the Moon and made two moonwalks totaling 9 hours and 23 minutes. On the first they set up experiments, among them:

• a reflector still used to measure the distance from Earth to the Moon;
• a seismometer that recorded thousands of moonquakes and helped reveal the structure of the Moon’s interior; and
• instruments that measured the solar wind and the Moon’s thin atmosphere and plasma environment.

They also brought a cart, the MET, nicknamed the “rickshaw,” to carry experiments out and samples back. It let them range farther from the lander than any crew before them.

The maps they carried had been made from overhead photographs, and on the ground the landscape looked quite different: valleys were deeper and hills higher than expected. “We’re really going up a pretty steep slope here,” one reported; “We got a ways to go yet.” At one point an astronaut announced “a little sand trap shot”; “That looked like a slice to me, Al,” came the reply.

The pair collected 95 pounds of lunar rock and soil, samples that revealed much about the formation of the solar system and the material that makes up the Moon.

Home again

The trip back was time to rest and reflect, but also to keep working: the crew conducted microgravity science, the kind of research that continues every day on the International Space Station. Kitty Hawk splashed down safely on February 9, 1971, nine days and two minutes — 216 hours and 2 minutes — after launch.

Apollo 14 achieved all the science it set out to do, and pushed the boundaries of exploration in ways later crews would build on — as will those who return to the Moon.

Sources

Based on "Apollo 14 ‘A Wild Place Up Here’," a NASA video (producer, writer and editor Amy Leniart) and its description, NASA Image and Video Library; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Crew quotations are from the 1971 mission audio.