Apollo 16 NASA Mission Reports

The landing site selected for the crew of Apollo 16 was in the lunar highland area of Descartes. NASA chose to send John Young to command the fifth lunar landing mission. Young had as much or more flight experience than any other member of the astronaut corps. He had circumnavigated the moon on Apollo 10 and he had flown two Gemini missions. Young would later go on to be the first commander of the Space Shuttle.

The Descartes landing site was chosen because it appeared to be of volcanic origin. If it was, it might reveal secrets about the origins of the Earth.

For three days Young and Duke embarked on their rover, away from the Lunar Module Orion , through rugged landscapes, in search of the origins of our world. Meanwhile Ken Mattingly shot hundreds of photographs and probed the moon's magnetic field from the Command Module Casper .

Back on Earth the political climate was beginning to turn against NASA and the remarkable risks, and exploits undertaken by the crew of Apollo 16 went almost unnoticed by the American public.

The three intrepid explorers and their spacecraft harvested a wealth of new data about the Earth-Moon system in an almost flawless performance of skill and bravado. Compiled here are many important documents about the mission including the complete debriefing in the crew's own words.

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