Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Apollo 17

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why Apollo 17 is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Apollo 17 known for probably being a moon landing famous for its 11 the main one nobody thinks much about it so let's have some fun let's find out why Apollo 17 is secretly incredibly fascinating Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of Apollo 17? Didn't happen. Not real.

There is no moon. Are you kidding me? When you first said that I was hoping you were a very specific conspiracy theorist where the other five landings happened. And you don't think we achieved Apollo 17, the last one. One through 16, we're all real, but 17, don't buy it. Yeah, Kubrick was busy until 17. He was like, all right, I'll throw in a moon landing, I guess. Right, right. It's to keep us on our toes. Have a real moon landing, a fake one, just

so we don't know which way they're coming and which way they're going. And also, you and I have briefly talked about this mission on the bonus show of the duct tape episode. Ah, yes. And we'll return to that a bit on the bonus show of this week's episode. Still just bonus stuff. There's also a long, long ago bonus about Apollo 12.

Yes. But otherwise, I find basically everything about space, either human exploration or just in general, to be siff. The public seems moderately uninterested in everything except the people Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Otherwise, forget it. Buzz Lightyear and Neil Strong. Neil Armstrong.

And Lance Armstrong. That's right. Neil Diamond. Neil Diamond and Buzz Aldrin. Yeah, I agree. I think it's CIF AF. And also, my serious answer to Apollo 17 is that there was the movie, right? The movie version of it with a... Was it a different Apollo? I thought there was a movie of one of them where they had a problem in space, which is the... Yes, Apollo 13. Okay, Apollo 13. It was Apollo 17 Air Buddies is the movie that I saw, which was about Air Bud going into space with his 17 illegitimate puppies. Shout out to Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries Wonderful Max Fun Show.

Austin and Brenda had us on a recent bonus show for them about a really surprisingly wild Air Bud sequel. Yeah. Anyway, it's great. I got Air Bud on the mind. So apparently I don't know how to count and I don't know my space missions show. No, no. This is like, this is truly information that most Americans don't know that Apollo 17 exists. Right. Or happened. Because it's out in space and people are like, is that relevant? It is. We'll talk about why it's amazing. Did we keep doing Apollo's or was this the last one? Is there like an Apollo 18?

So we'll talk more about that. But Apollo 11 was the first moon landing. And then 12 landed. 13 had a problem and turned around. And then 14, 15, 16, 17 landed. And so 17 is kind of our topic partly because it's the last moon landing. It's the last time any humans were on the moon. The one other hook for this topic for me is I learned this fact from a Norm MacDonald's appearance on the David Letterman show that I

saw a clip of on YouTube. He talks about how nobody knows the name of the last people who landed on the moon. And we know like other random celebrities. He was like, nobody knows the name of this guy. His name is Harrison Schmitt. And Schmitt's my last name. Harrison Schmitt spells it different. It's S-C-H-M-I-T-T. I spelled it wrong. The 12th person to set foot on the moon, 12th out of 12, is a guy named Harrison Schmidt, and that piqued my interest. I was like, oh.

Wow, yeah. Schmidt's on the moon. A Schmidt on the moon. A Schmidt on the moon. I would be the second one. Yeah. First for my spelling. Second Schmidt.

First of the one T to Schmidt's. Yeah, the correct kind, but it's okay. The right kind. Yeah, the correct kind, but it's okay. The right kind. Yeah. But we have so much else to totally discover about NASA landing on the moon, when Apollo 17, and we'll lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics about that, and a segment called,

can we read the stats tonight? Stats are where we are. It's enough for all SIFPOD numbers fans that we got this far. Nice. That name was submitted by Ella Squared on the Discord. We have a new name every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit through discord or to sifpot at gmail.com I feel like a tiny meerkat Nathan Lane is gonna pop up and snark at us and then a much bigger Pumba You know Timon sneaks up Pumba. Whoa, there he is Pumba Award hog I'm being told

I'm being told. That's... You're being told? I'm being told right now Pumba is a warthog. And they like to eat bugs. You're the anchor person doing live coverage of the Lion King. I'm being told that's a warthog. I'm being told the monkey is now involved. The monkey is now involved.

The first number this week is December involved. The monkey is now involved. The first number this week is December 1972. The end of 1972, that's the date of Apollo 17. The last mission to the moon. Okay. Well, last for now. We could go back there, Alex. Yeah. And we'll talk about the Artemis program and the bonus as well. That's the new program. That sounds either really cool or like something that's going to kill all of us, but I'm excited for it. I think cool. And they did Artemis 1 already, which was an unmanned dress rehearsal.

They just sent a ship around the moon and back. So, might go back. They just didn't put anything on there? There wasn't like a frog pilot or anything. They had three mannequins with instruments to test what would happen to a human body if we do this. I see scientific instruments, not like a mannequin with a saxophone, one with a keyboard. Just like clothes that are on sale, you know?

Okay. Yeah. Just like clothes that are on sale, you know? Ooh, okay. Yeah. It also had two dolls. It was a Shaun the Sheep and a Snoopy. Oh yeah, the Snoopy. And there are cameras inside it so they could tell what the gravity was doing from how the dolls were floating.

So that was cool. If that crashed, there could be sort of like when we get back there, it could have been colonized by a new race of Snoopies. Yeah, we should just get that going. Just get that going. It's a one-way trip. The Snoopy space program. Oh man, that'd be such a sad Charlie Brown special if Snoopy was like doing a like. Anyways, continue. Let's learn more about, so it happened in 1972, you said.

Yeah, it launched in Florida on December 7th. It landed on the moon December 11th, lifted back off December 14th, and a safe splash down in the Pacific Ocean December 19th. In general, it all went as planned. They even did fewer course adjustments on the way to the moon than they needed to possibly do. So it was a very smooth mission. That sounds great. Do you think that's why we don't really hear about it? It's only interesting to us if it's like the first one or oops, the time we almost killed everyone. The next number here is April of 1972. April of that year is the date of Apollo 16.

So it was only about eight months before Apollo 17 in December. And all six of our successful moon landings plus the Apollo 13 problem, that all happened in less than four years. Wow. And that's probably part of why Apollo 17 didn't get that much attention. I see. It's just so often we were landing on the moon from 1969 to 1972. We were just like, ah, forgot my car keys. Got to go back to the moon. There's like a few reasons Apollo 17 didn't get massive amounts of attention. And I feel like the main one is just how frequently we were successfully landing on the moon. I see.

Come on Neil Diamond. Don't forget your car keys. He's got to go to the show. Go to the moon. Go to the moon. Get the keys. And it was built for more TV coverage than it got. Starting with Apollo 10, which was the last dress rehearsal it orbited the moon. Starting with 10, all the missions carried a color TV camera. And they offered a range of broadcasts. There was live footage if networks wanted it. But only parts of Apollo 17 got televised. According to The Guardian, the launch of Apollo 17 aired on CBS. They interrupted a drama called Medical Center to air it and then got inundated with complaints. People were like, why are you interrupting a doctor show to show us a launch to the moon?

It sounds like a cool doctor show, like one of the ones where they're like doing an MRI but then having sex inside the MRI, but then that's how they discover that someone has like wieneritis. I don't know. I don't watch a lot of these doctor shows. No joke, I've seen like 15 seasons of Grey's Anatomy and that's pretty accurate. That's the gist. I think that is, where it's like, oh no, a fish went up your wiener. Yeah. Relationship drama, and then also solving the fish in your wiener problem.

Yeah. And then he's a character. They call him Mick Candiru, and he's like a fun character on the staff. Well, I was just up inside your eardrum, and it looks a little inflamed, buddy. And so people were like, I'm just getting on with life. Don't show me a launch to the moon. Seven days later, astronaut Gene Cernan takes the final human steps on the moon. NBC does not show that live.

They instead show not just the Johnny Carson show, but a rerun of Johnny Carson. It was not even a new episode. Can you imagine you work your whole life to become an astronaut, you actually go to the moon and then you get pushed out by an old Johnny Carson. Yeah. And so as this happens, it was news, but not wall to wall. And on the plus side, the astronauts did get to parade through the Super Bowl. No. Because Super Bowl VII was the next month, January 1973. A few weeks later, they were

part of Nixon's second inaugural parade, January 1973. Then did a national tour, a global goodwill tour. They were like doing events into the summer of 73. It wasn't ignored, but it didn't cause the public to demand Apollo 18. We were kind of done. Kind of sounds like the Harlem Globetrotters sort of thing, but with astronauts. Was there like a bad guys, the opposite team? What are they called? The Washington generals. The Washington generals. Is there a Washington generals version of the astronauts that go around being their dull foils while they

like shoot hoops around them? I wanted to say the Soviets, but that's kind of the even bigger reason that people didn't care about Apollo 17 is that we'd won the space race like six Apollo's ago. So who cares? The Soviets were turned into a Washington generals without any character or fun. Yeah. We sent another monkey up to moon to perish. Do you not care? Yeah. I mean, I think that it just seems like it lacked the drama, right? Of it being like, we already did it. This is just doing it more. That's wild though, because it is so cool that we were able to do that. Why did we stop other than it costs a lot of money? Or is that basically it? That's basically one of the two big reasons.

The other reason is that we said, let's answer next questions about space. Let's do new kinds of projects. Because we didn't close NASA, we started doing new things. We're shutting it down, boys. We've already been to the moon. It's so f***ed. There's nothing up there. It Boring. We're shutting it

down. Let's watch reruns of Carson. Let's watch it. What is this? A tape of the first moon landing? Tape over it. Tape over it. The other thing is the next number is three because three is how many further Apollo missions did get scrapped by the US government. They got canned. They were at least loose plans for Apollo's 18, 19, and 20, and then they canceled them. In some sense, Apollo 17 was just the last Apollo mission for going to the moon. We ended up turning some pieces of booster rockets into a space station called Skylab.

We also used Apollo's spacecraft to do missions called the Apollo-Soyuz missions, where Soviet Soyuz ships and American Apollo ships met in space and an astronaut and cosmonaut did a handshake and there was like a global unity message. So we basically cancelled Apollo by saying we have different questions and adventures to do now. Right. Like, can you make borscht in space? Can you make a burger in space? Can you make a borscht burger in space? And whichever food you can make, that's the better culture in country. They win the Cold War. So you really got to make a good burger. I'm at the astronaut.

I'm at the cosmonaut. I'm at the combination astronaut and cosmonaut. The Pizza Hut and Taco Bell is the Italian and Mexican ships meeting in space. Or really just two American ships, Taco Bell is from San Diego. But anyway, it's fine. That is true, yes. I do love that kind of idea of diplomacy, space diplomacy. I'm sure like, I don't know like if there's that much tension or anything on the space. I'm sure there is in politics and so on, but also it's just like, they're probably all scientists and stuff.

They all want to be there. It's really nice, I think, to have that kind of diplomacy, even if it doesn't always work. Yeah. Yeah. It's at least part of making it less fraught all around. It's nice, yeah. Also, they almost canceled Apollo 17 and Apollo 16. Apparently President Nixon, who was president for all of the moon landings.

Nixon at one point considered scrapping 16 and 17 and just finishing on 15. His advisor told him if they wanted to do that, they basically needed to go on a huge PR push of how amazingly successful 15 was and say, like, it was so good, we have no more moon questions. And then also at least- We solved the moon. We did it. We did it, everyone.

Moon is solved. And they predicted they would also need to at least keep NASA's budget the same if not raise it. Like if they were going to end Apollo, they needed to really sell the idea that it was for bigger questions and bigger goals. A bigger budget for NASA? I can't have that. That's my Nixon.

Can you believe that I don't do stand up? Isn't that incredible? What if Nixon did try to cancel it and no one could tell what he was saying? I don't know, when we figure out what he's saying. He also gets away with Watergate, none of the tapes are audible or clear. Like I guess. Yeah, sir, what do you want? You want upies, sir?

You want upies, sir? You want uppies? Yeah. They do plan these projects well ahead of time and the crew of Seventeen knew they were the last moon mission, well ahead of time. They left a metal plaque on the moon with text, quote, here man completed his first explorations of the moon. They could have left anything they wanted though because like they knew that we're probably not gonna go back for a really long time so they're not gonna get in trouble. They could have like drawn a naughty wiener on the moon and no one would know. Very end of the main show we'll talk about something silly they did

leave. So that's fun. Oh.. Oh, I'm excited for that. I like silly stuff on the moon. And the other thing is they did do funny last words on the moon by accident. Because there's like the famous Neil Armstrong first steps on the moon words. And so astronaut Gene Cernan, he said two final statements for the Apollo moon landings. As he re-entered the lander, Cernan said, quote, we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind. All right.

And so those were like the planned last words on the moon. And then he's like, ah, ow, oh, as he fell down the ladder. Upset cat noise. So he gets back in the ship and does say another thing before they take off. So technically the last thing said on the moon is, quote, okay, Jack, let's get this mother out of here. Oh, fantastic. I love that. And Jack is the nickname of Harris and Schmidt.

So Cernan and Schmidt were the last two people on the moon. And that's technically the most recent thing we've said there. That is cool. That's like the coolest thing you could say, leaving the moon. And yeah, and then another number here is three because that's the size of Apollo 17's crew. Each Apollo mission had three crew members, two of whom went to the moon, at least was the plan.

Okay. So, Eugene Cernan was the commander, Harrison Schmidt was the lunar module pilot. They both went to the moon. And Ronald E. Evans was the command module pilot and stayed in orbit while they went to the moon. Okay. So that's something that one guy just didn't get to go on the moon. Yeah.

And there's six of those guys. There's six missions that landed on the moon and they each had a guy who didn't go down. That happened every time. Did they at least bring some sand back to them? Like, here's some moon sand. I do get the sense they were all like proud at least, you know, it's cool. Yeah.

But yeah, I don't know what they each wanted or got out of it, yeah. Yeah, maybe one, he just really hated walking. So he's like, you guys can go, I'll stay here. I'll just hang out here. Oh, my ponies are killing me. I did a long run before we took off, oh, ah. Fellas, my dogs are barking. Thank you.

What was the term you used? My ponies or something? Yeah, I was going for dogs are barking, but I have heard like stretch out the ponies about legs. Stretch out the ponies. I've never heard that before. It's so good. Yeah. I think it's a Kyle Kinean statement. He's great. I'm incorporating that. Yeah, stretch out the ponies. That's stretching out my ponies. Dogs are barking. My owls are hooting. And a few more numbers here. The next one is 2002. The year 2002 is when Gene Cernan gave an

interview about how he feels about being the last person to step on the moon as of now. He told the Guardian Sunday Observer, quote, it is a very dubious honor. It tells us how much we have not done rather than how much we have done, end quote. Interesting. So does he, from his perspective, we should go back to the moon. So does he, from his perspective, we should go back to the moon. Like, because there's the argument that you kind of hinted at earlier, which is that we can go to the moon and do research on the moon, but it's possible that it is more valuable to do research on space elsewhere. But he is of the opinion that, no, the moon's great.

We should go back there and do more moon stuff. Is it because he thinks the moon is just neat and inspiring? Or do you think he has specific research that he has in mind that we might do on the moon? It's mainly the inspirational thing. And then these current Artemis missions, their main stated goal is to set up possible future missions to Mars. I see, yeah. By establishing facilities and presence on the moon that we can work from. And so that's almost the new science goal is to go beyond the moon by getting to the

moon. So that we can all be Elon Musk's little Mars slaves and grow potatoes out of our poop and terraform Mars, which is much easier than solving any of our problems here. Yeah, that sounds right. I'm signed up. Yeah. He seems stable.

Sign me up for Poop Potatoes. Call him Pootatoes. Matt Damon had the right idea. The Martian is a great movie. I really like it. There's so much potatoes. It is a pretty solid movie. I like how it essentially ended in the same exact way of Saving Private Ryan too.

You could just cut Saving Private Ryan and that movie together, the endings, and it wouldn't change it at all. Yeah, it's just the same thing. Directors love ending movie with Matt Damon gets old. Yeah. Even kind of the Ocean's movies, he's the young guy on the crew and then it's exciting to see him age into being more of an authority figure, you know? It's like, whoa, it's Matt Damon. He's getting old! Whoa!

Our sweet boy. Our sweet boy is getting old. Our sweet boy. He's America's sweet boy. Look at this little chubby, he's America's sweetheart, little boy next door. But he's old now! Whoa! Movie over.

Well, and OK, the last number's here. Katie didn't know these are the last numbers. The last number is four because that's the number of living people who've been on the moon. Ah, Matt Damon. Which I feel is good news. There's still four of them, even though Apollo 17 was 52 years ago. Wow.

So who are they, including Matt Damon? One of them is Harrison Schmidt. Wow. So who are they, including Matt Damon? One of them is Harrison Schmidt. Hey! He is still alive as of this recording. He's 89 years old. Make it sound like, but tomorrow, who knows? And that's vaguely threatening, I would say. He's 89 years old.

You know, that's what it is. You know, but I think he's going to last another day, Alex. Let's have some optimism here. It is this thing where they're all very old and they're also astronauts. So they're in amazing physical shape and have the best care. I'm pretty optimistic at least one of them will be around for Artemis landing on the moon, which will fill me with great emotion. I really care about space and the space program.

The one younger guy is Charles Duke from Apollo 16, who is a slightly younger 89 years old. And the other living moonwalkers are David Scott of Apollo 15 and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11. Moonwalkers. That's such a cool name for them. They're the last moonwalkers. Oh, you could have a movie called The Last Moonwalkers starring Matt Damon as all of the last moonwalkers and he gets old at the end. Yeah. And so Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt were the last two on the moon. Ronald Evans piloted. And we have many takeaways about why their mission was extremely amazing and important, even though nobody knows about it. Starting with takeaway number one, Apollo 17 might have taken the

single most amazing photograph in human history. It's, it's, I think I'm looking at it now. It's called the blue marble. He sent me four photos. Which one is the world's greatest photo? Is it this one of the earth from far away that gives you a sense of perspective on the universe or is it this piece of metal that is sort of bent with what looks like duct tape that Alex also sent me? I'm sure he'll explain it later. But yeah, the blue marble is a pretty great photo.

I do believe I've seen it quite a bit. The first two takeaways are about the unprecedented achievements of Apollo 17 in geology and in photography. And this photography takeaway, the blue marble is probably the most important single photo ever taken by humans. And it's something that we kind of take for granted now because we have a picture

of the earth, but we didn't in this way before they did it. So I'm looking at this and the earth looks suspiciously spherical. Yeah, just for listeners context, Katie thinks there's a flat Earth. And before we taped, she told me that the moon is probably a giant cracker rather than a spherical planetoid sort of thing. Not a flat Earth, Alex. A cube Earth. I believe it's a cube.

Oh. A cube of the cracker. That's the Earth and the moon. The moon is a cone. And we're just seeing the flat side of the cone, Alex, of the moon. Cone moon. Cone moon. And yeah, and key sources for this takeaway include expertise from the blog of NASA astronaut

Scott Kelly, digital resources from the Planetary Society, and a piece for theconversation.com by art historian Sheri Larson of Griffith University in Australia. The blue marble is a photo of Earth. We'll have it linked, but people might kind of know it in the back of their mind too. It's the first ever complete single image of the Earth without any shadow over part of an entire spherical view. It is a beautiful photograph. Our planet is surprisingly quite pretty from this distance.

I mean, obviously I think there's a lot of beautiful things about earth, but it didn't have to be this aesthetically pleasing, right? But it is. It's got these beautiful white swirls, this blue ocean. Am I looking at Africa? Yeah. Okay. The main land masses in the image are Antarctica and all of Africa and then the Arabian Peninsula

at the top and the rest of its oceans. And that's why we call it a blue marble rather than land colored or whatever. It's a lot of ocean and then those land masses. or whatever. It's a lot of ocean and then those landmasses. Earth's mostly oceans. Whales are really pulling all the strings, but it is a beautiful photo. And I guess, you know, I understand it's a photograph, but I guess like since we kind of grew up in the age of CGI, it might be less impressive to us now, right? Because it's like you press a button and boom, That might be less impressive to us now, right? Because it's like you press a button and boom, image of Earth generated, right? You can even have it move around or have a funny face that says stuff. But this is emotionally significant to actually see the Earth in this way.

Yeah, and that stuff, I will never experience it in person in space. Stuff like the blue marble is the way I will. At least a Schmidt did. So that's nice. Yes, it's true actually. Way to go, Schmitz. Previous Apollo missions achieved partial images of the Earth with shadow over part of it. The other kind of mind blowing one for the world is a picture that we've called

Earthrise. It was taken by astronaut Bill Anders on board Apollo 8 when he was orbiting the moon. Sunrise, but it's Earth and therefore it's called Earthrise. Yeah. Sipping a cup of Earth or moon coffee, watching the Earthrise. Moon brunch or as they call it, munch. I know that technically the one for Apollo 17 where it's the whole earth is more impressive because it gets the whole earth in the photo. It's a gorgeous photo.

The Earthrise one I think is actually more evocative to me personally, because you see the landscape of the moon before you and then it gives you that sense of distance from the earth and kind of that feeling of like how strange it must be to be that far away from the entire planet. I can't, if I experienced this, I would lose my sense of self in like a second. Yeah. And the Apollo 17 picture was extraordinarily hard to take. Because there's so many people on earth, at least one person had their eyes closed.

Hey, you! You in sub-South Africa, hey, open your eyes. They were 29,000 kilometers from the earth. They used a film camera to snap a still image. And according to Scott Kelly, it took astounding photography skills to do that because, quote, in order to view the earth as a fully illuminated globe, a person or camera must be situated in front of it with the sun directly at his or her back. And Kelly says that's super difficult to do while moving at speeds of many thousands of miles per hour, which was the speed of an Apollo crafts on its transit to the moon.

Space station like the ISS is way too close to the earth to get this kind of picture. Most of the new pictures we generate are composites of a bunch of smaller images with a lot of photo editing. The astronauts took the blue marble picture on analog film on a camera with no viewfinder, a fixed shutter speed that was mounted to the outside of the spaceship. Wow. And it was like mainly built to do a survey of the moon and Harris and Schmidt in particular wanted to look at weather on earth and took some pictures looking back at the earth as they traveled.

That's incredible. Did he time it, know about this issue and really make sure to time it or was there a bit of luck involved? It's both, yeah. They took a lot of pictures and? It's both, yeah. They took a lot of pictures and this one worked out. Wow.

Was there one where it had like a green alien thumb blocking it? Maybe the most amazing part is they had to do a spacewalk on the way back to Earth to get the film. Because the film and the camera are on the outside of the ship. Oh, it's not going to survive because the Earth gets spicy when you re-enter it. It gets a little bit toasty. Oh, wow. I didn't even think about that. There's so many things. I'm like, well, just put it in a Ziploc bag. Oh, you mean... Right. He didn't get to walk on the moon, but Ronald Evans is why we have the blue marble picture. He did at a one hour, six minute space walk on December 17th on the way back to Earth to retrieve the various film cassettes, including this picture. That's incredible. And then the

whole crew returns to Earth safely enough for their analog film to be fine and then get hand developed in a dark room to make a blue marble picture. What if someone like opened up the door to the dark room like and lit the light and is like, hey fellas, how's those moon pictures coming? Oh, hey. Kids, there used to be a process by which we would develop photographs and it was made out of, like the photographic paper and chemicals were all very sensitive. So if you open the door before they were fully fixed and developed, you would ruin everything.

So right, right. This is 1972. It's like, to us, extraordinarily primitive photography technology. Yes, I say having done this in high school. Yeah, it's like, oh, it's a throwback. You can do it. But no, it's, yeah. And so yeah, thanks to that astonishing effort, the blue marble picture is arguably the most reproduced single photo in human history. And we also think that in a way that can't be measured, it sparked a lot of political and psychological changes, or at least began them.

Because it was just two and a half years after the first Earth Day holiday, became an icon of that new environmental movement. And also, according to professional geographer Dennis Cosgrove, it's one of the first popular images of the earth that did not follow European and US conventions for maps. Because not only are there no borders, no meridians, no latitudes, longitudes, it also centers Africa. And that's an accident. They didn't pick any particular continent, but it's one of the only images Americans have seen where Africa is centered and is also not

shrunk by the map projection style. Because Africa is huge, but our maps, because it's near the equator, they shrink it. Africa and then the Asian landmass, it's enormous. And yet we kind of like get this sense of like, America's really big. Which it is, but yeah, we kind of, we're juicing, we're juicing the maps a little bit in our favor. So I love this picture. It's Apollo 17 specifically. If we canceled the mission, never would have got it. Like I feel like I wouldn't have a concept of it without that picture existing. My brain would be different. I think my concept of it would be like the little Earth guy from Schoolhouse Rock. I think there's like a little Earth globe guy who walks around.

So that's how I would imagine it. It's got a little cartoon face, little legs. Does he sing about how an Earth becomes a law? I'm just an Earth. I'm only an earth. The next takeaway here is that other field of achievement. Takeaway number two. Apollo 17 crew member Harrison Schmitz might have conducted the most amazing geology study in human history. Did he taste a rock? I don't think so.

You know, kind of the opposite actually. I would have stuck one of them rocks in my mouth so fast. I ate dirt as a kid though, so. It turns out it'd be really bad for you actually. But the moon dust is terrible for you. It's really bad because it's like really, really sharp, right? Like it's kind of like, almost like silica dust where it's like super, super sharp. You don't want to breathe it in and it would cut you right up. Yeah, it's no good. And they had to overcome that.

But there's, you know, there's a lot of amazing geology studies on Earth. Apollo 17 discovered almost everything we know about the moon. They either advanced or verified our theories about it based on the many amazing geological finds of the mission led by Harrison Schmidt. How? What did they discover about the moon? Is it not made out of cheese as Wallace and Gromit have led me to believe. So one thing they found is orange soil. Orange soil. So like the color orange soil.

Yeah. Interesting. Because we all think of the moon as gray or whatever. And they found patches of orange soil that turned out to be volcanic glass. Whoa. Like tiny beads of glass from an ancient volcano. Do they think there was a volcano on the moon or that this is from sort of an earth volcano? We think the moon was very volcanically active. Whoa, volcano on the moon. Yeah, and it's the kind of glass

that forms commonly from earth volcanoes, but Schmidt documents it, brings it's the kind of glass that forms commonly from Earth volcanoes, but Schmidt documents it, brings it back, and then not only do we think that makes the moon volcanically active relatively recently, later studies suggest that the glass formed in a gaseous atmosphere rather than the current then exosphere, almost no atmosphere of the moon. Whoa, gassy moon! So a few billion years ago, it had a thick atmosphere and significant volcanic activity. Wow. That sounds like a planetary pickup line.

Like, hey baby, you have a thick atmosphere and some planetary volcanic activity going on. Yeah, that's how you hit on Venus. Yeah. It's a good move. They have a great atmosphere. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, let me move. They have a great atmosphere. Yeah.

Yeah. Wait, let me revise my pickup line. I've got it now. Hey, baby, is that just your thick atmosphere? Wait, no, hang on. I'm not good at flirting if I was a planet. She's leaving. She's leaving the part.

Hey, baby. Hey, baby, is that a thick atmosphere? Is that just my volcanic activity? Good job representing the earth and the planet, Barb. Good job. Good job. Yeah, and that glass has also helped us understand how much water is on the moon. Apollo 14, the third one to land on the moon, they detected water vapor, which was a massive discovery. And then further missions said, let's look at it more. And study of stuff like that glass suggests there is ice and potentially liquid

water under the south pole of the moon. Ooh, you know what that means, right? Making hydrogen fuel out of it, possibly. Yeah. Moon fishing. Right, fishing. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Moon fishing. Right, fishing. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Moon fishing. Drink moon coffee, eat munch, and then go out and catch some moon fish. Yeah. That is very cool.

I mean, obviously, the existence of water is not enough for there to be life. You need a lot of other factors. Also, it depends on what form the water is in, right? If it's like vapor or ice, that's not going to be conducive to any living organism, even bacteria or extremophiles. But that is still very interesting that it has this history and currently has ice and water. What are some of the implications of that?

Right. And we're still figuring it out. Yeah. In a 2024 interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that one of our next goals with the Artemis missions is to check out the water on the moon and understand it better. We know it's there partly because of Apollo 17 and we need to know more. There could be a lot or a little or something. Yeah.

What is the basic understanding of how the moon formed? You had an asteroid that bonked into Earth, and a chunk of Earth went into space, and then coalesced around the moon. I mean, coalesced into the moon, orbited the Earth, because it was in this sweet spot where it's remained in Earth's orbit, but then coalesced around itself rather than all the chunks just falling back into Earth.

Our theory, partly based on Apollo 17's discoveries, is that about 4.5 billion years ago, 4.5 billion, there was what's now the earth, but it was smaller, and it smashed into another planet-sized body that's about the size of current Mars. And that enormous collision caused a bunch of stuff to aggregate into the bigger current Earth, and then also a molten red body of material that has cooled down into being the Moon. So, we think it was a massive smash-em-up. And then we got a bigger Earth and the moon. Well, like I said, something bonked in. A little bit of a fender bender.

Yeah. And the moon was like molten and red and very volcanic until relatively recently in geologic time. And it wasn't like an Earth atmosphere, but it had an atmosphere of all these volcanic gases. And it wasn't like an earth atmosphere, but it had an atmosphere of all these volcanic gases. And we think it has a partially molten active core still. Ooh. Do you know when it stopped being volcanically active? They debate it, but it was probably at least a billion years. Probably nothing with eyes had evolved yet to see a cool volcano moon, because I'd love to see a cool volcano

moon. Well, yeah. And Apollo 17 also found out that the magnetic field of the moon is stronger than we thought, because it brought back the biggest Hall of Moon rocks of any Apollo mission. And the scientists on Earth were surprised that some of the rocks were magnetic. And we are still studying them to this day. In 2021, a team at Oxford used MIT equipment to demagnetize and study some of the Apollo 17 rocks.

And they theorized that there was a stronger lunar magnetic field than we expected. And that also probably protected the new Earth from some asteroids. Interesting. And then another researcher just pocketed one and uses it to put his kids' art up on the fridge. Apollo 17 also theorized that there is helium on the moon, even though you would think it would escape through the exosphere. And that was just a theory. We were able to confirm it with the 2012 findings of a NASA probe called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Huh. We had some of these theories about the Moon before, but Apollo 17 advanced or verified all of them. The key reason for most of this was specifically Harrison Schmidt,

mainly because he is arguably the most science-specific human ever to visit the moon. Twelve people have walked on it. The other 11 had US military backgrounds as test pilots and engineers. And Harrison Schmidt was a professional geologist who began to train as a pilot when they thought they might use him as an astronaut. He had worked for the US Geological Survey, the Norwegian government. He helped NASA design training programs in Arizona and then did a crash course in flight training as a last step toward being an astronaut.

That doesn't surprise me that a geologist would want to go to like big rock in the sky as their ultimate career goal. I respect that. It's like, ooh, big rock, big rock, ooh, biggest rock. I'm going there. I'm going to go to the big rock. It does seem like a way to get really disappointed as a biologist and really excited as a geologist. Like yeah, I knew there would be rocks here. I was right.

Yeah, cool. Look, you know, I'm just saying we should stick a colony of tardigrades on the moon and see how they do. Yeah. Colonize the moon! The other fun thing to me about him is that Harrison Schmidt, out of all the 12 people who've walked on the moon, had the worst symptoms from moon dust. It like really messed up his respiration. Not dangerously. Okay.

Because of how he described the experience of the congestion, the sneezing, the coughing. We now call it... Moon flu. We now call it like moon hay fever. That was what he called it. Oh, but moon flu is better. I'm so mad about that. Moon flu is better. We should have sent Katie. Guys, moon flu. Sipping your moon, the moon walkers sipping their moon coffee to kind of clear their sinuses after getting moon flu. This dust is much sharper and less eroded than dust on earth. With the gravity and the wind and so on on earth, particles smooth out or break down

more. And lunar dust is spiky, tiny. According to University of California pulmonary physiologist Kim Prisk, the particles are 50 times smaller than a human hair. They can hang around for months inside the lungs. And you know, the astronauts have suits on, but the dust gets on them, it gets into the ship. If they un-helmet at all, they breathe it in. And all 12 astronauts

had irritating symptoms from this, but Schmidt got it the worst and had to overcome it to study the dust and the rocks and everything. As a Schmidt, do you get bad seasonal allergies? I do. I really relate to this. I wonder if this is a Schmidt feature. And NASA, for some reason, the PR running up to the launch, they described him as kind of a nerd. That's mean.

The New York Times described him as, quote, a quiet, serious bachelor who does not own a television set or a stereo, end quote. A bachelor, you say? And he was 37 and not married, which even in the early 70s was like, whoa, you know? And so- Hopefully that changed after he walked on the god-fucking-moon, ladies. I'm just saying, or men, whoever's interested. That's something to put on your Tinder profile. I walked on the moon.

He did get married. I want to check. He married Teresa Fitzgibbon. That's great. Okay. Not that he has to. Teresa. And he sidled up next to Teresa and was like, is that your thick atmosphere or is that my

planetary volcanic activity. He sounds like the astronaut version of an indoor kid who likes rocks. So I really appreciate his efforts, Harrison Schmidt. I think we should put more nerds on the moon, to be honest. Because who better to go up there than someone whose special interest is like the moon or rocks like Send them there so that they can learn cool stuff about it Cuz like what's someone from the military gonna do shoot the moon. I've tried it doesn't work Still there

Mocking me It's it's so fun to me. So thank you Apollo 17 for everything. And folks, we have two more amazing takeaways that are even stranger about this mission. We're going to take a quick break in the ship and then return to the moon. This episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating is brought to you by Wild Grain. The holiday season is here, it's time to start baking delicious homemade favorites with family and friends. Wild Grain is here to make you look like a baking expert without the stress.

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And we're back. Two more takeaways here. Takeaway number three. Apollo 17 causes a moonquake every morning. What? The leftover spacecrafts causes a minor earthquake on the moon every day. Wow. I've literally never heard of this. that seems bad. Doesn't seem good.

It's not like a problem. It's just that it appears on our seismometers and in our readings, all of the ones we've ever taken since it landed and took off again. Because not all of the ship takes back off. If it has a bad enough earthquake, if we put too many things on there and we break the moon, where's the moon gonna fall? On us, Alex. It's gonna fall on us. Oh, like in the film Moonfall, the documentary. Like in the film, the award-winning, Academy Award-winning movie Moonfall. The thing is, it turns out the moon is pretty seismically active. I feel like there's just an exciting learning in the moon is not completely dead and gray. It's like got orange glass on it and it's

doing stuff. That's neat. An additional form of seismic activity comes from the sun heating the leftover bottom of the Apollo 17 lander. Because the way the landers work is a whole lander comes down and then only part of it takes back off. I see. So there's leftover lander. Because the way the landers work is a whole lander comes down and then only part of it takes back off. I see. So there's leftover landers from all the Apollos that landed, like the bottom of the lander. I see. So then, but then it gets heated up by the sun.

Yeah. And I guess that means it kind of warms the earth or the moon around it. Yes. It's a thermal moonquake. Yeah. Whoa. It's cool. That's nuts. So, but the Moon's okay?

Like they're like, ah, Moon will be fine. Okay. Yeah, Moon will be fine to you. I don't know if I trust them, because they're the ones that put that stuff on the Moon. It's like, ah, don't worry about it. It's like a very used car salesman, space scientist, like, it's fine, it's fine, just get in it, just get in it.

Yeah. Yeah, this baby will go 100,000 billion miles, slaps it, the thing falls off. This is an amazing new study of old seismometer data. A seismometer studies seismic activity. This was from a 2023 analysis of it done by a team at Caltech. Space.com covered this piece by Stephanie Waldek. It's new science. We just keep getting new science from old missions when it comes to space.

It's amazing. The first humans on the moon, Apollo 11 mission, they put our first seismometer on the moon. All of the landings studied the seismic activity. Apollo 17 placed a set of three of them and did it in the most advanced way because that's the last mission and Harrison Schmidt knew what he was doing. And as we've studied the seismic data, we've detected not just moonquakes, but four distinct kinds. There are a deep kind and a shallow kind, both basically driven by the active core of the moon. It doesn't have tectonic plates like Earth, but the core is active and causes that. There's a third kind called thermal quakes that can be from the core or

from the sun's heat. And then a fourth reading that's meteorites hitting the moon, and we just detect the impact and that's it. Well, I get how meteorites hitting the moon causes a quake, but how does the difference in temperature is what's causing the quake, but what actually happens? One part is contracting and the other is expanding and then that makes it jiggle? Yeah, they're basically jiggles. Like it's, it's not a San Andreas fault line in the movie San Andreas kind of earthquake where everything falls apart and huge mountains throw up. It's just like moving.

And the rock like jumps a lot or was that Vin Diesel? I get them confused. The Rock, the actor The Rock, yeah. Okay, okay. The Rock. The Rock on the Rock. That would be fun. Like, oh, there should be a movie where... Where he plays Harrison Schmidt. Exactly. I agree. Where he plays... No, he's the love interest of Harrison Schmidt. And it's like, you're the rock that got away from me, a geologist. Yeah, so the thermal kind of quakes are not really something that Earth has because when the moon shifts from lunar day to lunar night, it's a massive temperature change. It swings from around 121 degrees Celsius to negative 133, which is 250 Fahrenheit to

negative 208 Fahrenheit. That's very hot, Alex, and very cold. How do people go up there without dying? Carefully. Oh. And there's a lot of insulation and temperature regulation with the suits. Yeah. Yeah, it's really a lot. And so this Caltech team, they used machine learning to do a new analysis of our various old seismometer data. Because most of it's from the 1970s.

That's when the instruments worked and then stopped. But they found, hey, there's a bizarrely regular set of moonquakes that happen every day, just one location, like clockwork in the morning. And they realized that it's from the base of the Apollo 17 lunar lander, heating and expanding and vibrating when the sun touches it. So we left the moon a little gift. Yeah. Yeah, and we need to factor that in our old data.

We're like, some of this is just our machine getting hot. Okay. I can't believe they littered on the moon. Yeah, all the missions did. Starting with Apollo 15, they sent up lunar rovers. Up 15 had the first rover, 16 and 17 had rovers. So those machines left tire tracks all over. And our probes have seen huge tire track marks, especially from 17, just all over it, the

surface of it still. Do they ever go like, oh my god, aliens! Oh no, no, that's ours. That's our stuff. Yeah, sort of. Yeah. I guess if you're an alien, you can drive your car up there and it won't really get noticed. It'll just blend in. You know, it's cool. Yeah.

So that's a tip for aliens. A hot tip. Maybe while you're up there, like clean up some of our junk, aliens. Sorry about that. Yeah. That leads perfectly into the last takeaway of the main show because takeaway number four, Apollo 17 contributed to a legitimately interesting pile of human poop on the moon. I knew it. I knew it. I knew there was poop on the moon.

I knew it, Alex. This whole time I was thinking that there's got to be poop on the moon! I knew it, Alex. This whole time I was thinking that there's gotta be poop on the moon. All right, tell me about this moon poop, Alex. Yeah, it's both very funny and potentially scientifically exciting, and in a way that's totally unique. And the key source is here- We're gonna colonize the moon with poop bacteria, Alex? So we're curious if we did, basically.

Like when you said earlier, what if we put tardigrades up there? We kind of tried this by accident. What if we start a whole race of aliens billions of years into the future that came from our poop? What if we came from an alien's poop, Alex? What if this is all a simulation that came from poop? I mean, I can't disprove it, you know? Sure. Right. Yeah, it's possible.

That makes it real. You got no evidence against it. Key sources here. It's a piece for vox.com by science writer Brian Resnick, also resources from the University of Hawaii and a piece for space.com by Robert Leah. All six of the Apollo missions that landed on the moon deposited bags of their poop from the lander. And like little doggie bags? Like when I clean up my doggie poop bag thing? Basically trash bags. They left a combined total of 96 waste bags containing poop as well as vomit and some food waste. Okay, poop, vomit, and food waste and then just piled up there?

Yeah, the spaceships did not have toilets and they had a specific collection system for urine and they could expel urine out in space. But everything else they basically just stuffed in trash bags to deposit on the moon. Why didn't they just bring it back? Right? Because you'd go up with a certain amount of mass and even if it is excreted in poop and vomit form, it seems like you should be able to bring it back. Like why couldn't they bring it back with them? They just decided that the weight calculation made the most sense that way and it saved

the most fuel and was the easiest way to do it. Sounds like they're lazy. Because you do have to do math for, we're landing on the moon with these bags, we're leaving without it. There is some labor to figure that out, but it made more sense than ditching it in space before reentry to the earth or something. Yeah, I don't know that I approved though. That just seems... It's like when people don't pick up after their dog poop and you ask, why? Why did you not do this? It's like, well,

the calculation was really hard to make. I don't know. I could have thrown off the calibration of the dog. That's kind of gross, but also interesting in terms of maybe base poop, what happens to it. Alex, we don't know yet, right? We gotta go back and check in on that space poop. Yeah, so we're just curious how it is doing. And that means that it's one of the scientifically potential interesting things for sending people back to the moon. We didn't monitor or check these bags. About 50% of the mass of human feces is bacteria. It represents some of the 1,000 plus species of microbes in our gut.

The food waste has other microbes. Bombard has other microbes. So we left that in the extreme and extraterrestrial environment of the moon for more than 50 years now. And the latest samples are from Apollo 17. So it's a experiment. Like we could go check what happened. Maybe nothing. Like, guys, I'll be back in 15. I got to go do a little experiment. I mean, I am skeptical, right? I don't necessarily think the moon is particularly hospitable even to the most hearty of bacterias, right?

But I mean, it's possible, I suppose, right? One could be surprised. There are bacteria that can survive extreme environments, very toxic, very hot, very cold environments. I don't know how they're going to do, like if there's enough stuff up there, right? Like they would need enough nutrition and enough elements to like survive. So I don't know if that would work, but it's interesting. Maybe when we get that back there, they'll have a little poop town going. Yeah, because part of the reason they just dumped it is they at least expected or predicted

it would all just die. So we're not colonizing the moon. We're not messing it up. But maybe it did or maybe it didn't. So it's just interesting to check. Yeah, let's go. Now I'm convinced we gotta go back and check on the poop, see how it's doing. Yeah, and in our bonus show, we'll talk about, among other things, humans returning to the moon. So please support the show and check it out. Like with a poop scoop and a litter pail.

Just like, all right, go back, boys. Clean up your mess. The world's most dangerous litter box. Hey, folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, Apollo 17 might have taken the single most amazing photograph in human history, the blue marble photograph. Takeaway number two, Apollo 17 crew member Harrison Schmidt

might have conducted the most amazing geology study in human history. Takeaway number three, Apollo 17 causes a moonquake every morning. Takeaway number four, Apollo 17 contributed samples to a legitimately interesting pile of human poop on the moon. And then so many numbers and statistics about the timeline of Apollo 17, how much or little people paid attention to it, how much or little there were further Apollo missions before

or after this, and more. Those are the takeaways, and I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a review of a duct tape story about Apollo 17, and then the interesting pressure Apollo 17 puts on the Artemis missions.

Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 18 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include so many digital resources from NASA. NASA just really documents what they do very well. Also amazing stuff from

the European Space Agency about the Apollo missions. Also the blog of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and tons of well-researched journalism from Smithsonian Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and

elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And join the free CIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 102 that's about the topic of manatees.

Fun fact there, manatees can raise and lower their position in the water by farting. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shavin' by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support.

Extra extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.