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

Interviewed by Gemma Lavender

BIO

Charles Duke

As the Lunar Module pilot for Apollo 16, Duke became the tenth and youngest person to walk on the Moon at the age of 36, when he landed on its surface in 1972. An engineer, retired Air Force officer and test pilot, Duke has spent over 260 hours in space.

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?