Original subtitles

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.

Here on the 12th of September 1959,

the young rocketeers of the Soviet space program

were secretly preparing to launch a probe

called Lunik 2.

Its destination was the moon.

If it reached its goal,

this would be the first time

humans had touched another world.

Just 40 years ago, little was known about the moon.

What was it made of?

Was there life on it?

And how did it come to be formed?

The answers came from the hostility

of the Cold War.

The race to the moon was a showdown

between two superpowers

intent on proving their supremacy.

But it also became the greatest voyage

of scientific discovery in history.

It began with Lunik 2.

The Soviets had used all their

technical know-how to build a probe.

But to score the propaganda coup

of reaching the moon first,

there was one thing the lacked:

they had no means of tracking Lunik

all the way, no way to prove they really got there.

This was the challenge that faced

one of Lunik's chief engineers, Boris Chertok.

The Soviets sent a covert message

to Jodrell Bank in Manchester,

the only place in the world which could

track a probe so far away in space.

Its director was Bernard Lovell.

To my astonishment, I found on the telex machine

the long message from Moscow

giving complete details,

not only of the transmission frequencies

of this Lunik, but also its position,

calculated for the latitude

and longitude of Jodrell Bank.

And this, of course, was a clear indication

that we were meant to do something about it.

So we sprang into action.

We immediately found the bleep-bleep on the Lunik

at exactly the position Russia stated,

and this indicated that the Lunik was

destined for the moon.

And the impact was, I recall, I think

two minutes, 23 seconds past 10 o'cock

when Lunik hit the moon

and the signal suddenly ceased.

There was, of course, an uproar from the press

because it was realized that the Russians

had achieved a remarkable degree

of technological expertise in doing this.

The timing was perfect.

A week later, Nikita Khruschev became

the first Soviet premier to visit America.

He took a replica of the Lunik probe with him.

My father was so excited

that he would told to his assistant in the plane,

"What do you think if we present the American president

"with the copy of the probe

"on the first meeting in the airfield?"

And they told Mr. Khruschev, "You know

"that he will not be very happy with this present

"and maybe it will not be so polite to do this.

"I'm the first to visit," my father told.

"I will do this in the White House."

So when he first visited the White House,

he brought this, he told, "Mr. President,

"I want to give to you my best gift.

"It is a copy of the probe

"which we sent to the moon just recently,

"and I want you to have the copy of this

"because you still didn't do this."

The Soviets had shocked the world

with Sputnik, the first-ever satellite.

Now they had reached the moon.

Their next probe, Lunik 3, flew around it

and sent back the first pictures of the dark side,

the side that always faces away from us.

On April the 12th 1961,

the Soviets put their supremacy beyond doubt.

Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.

Enough was enough.

America's new president needed to make

his own grand gesture.

All the eyes of the world now look into space,

to the moon and to the planets beyond.

And we have vowed

that we shall not sit governed

by a hostile flag of conquest,

but by a banner of freedom and peace.

We choose to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon,

we choose to go to the moon

in this decade and do the other things,

not because they are easy,

but because they are hard.

Khruschev had to decide

whether to race the Americans to the moon.

He summoned his generals to a meeting

at a secret location in Georgia.

The meeting was captured on film

by Khruschev's son, Sergei,

himself a rocket scientist.

As a Khruschev's son, and nobody would tell me

"Don't film this meeting."

But when I began to film the report

of the commander-in-chief of the navy,

all these military officials look at me

so negative that I stopped it.

Khruschev set forth the space achievement

but he was not ready to spend too much money,

so it was long discussion.

And at last, Khruschev told, "Yes, let's go."

The race was on.

Both sides began training their top fighter pilots

for a mission to the moon.

For the scientists who were also recruited,

this was a unique chance to understand another world.

Among them was geologist Farouk El-Baz.

When I came here to the United States

looking for a job,

I was writing letters for application

and my wife will type these letters

and I remember at that time,

we would sort something like 120 letters.

And then I saw an ad in a magazine.

I wrote that application, too, and gave it to her.

It was late at night and she said,

"What's this about?"

I said, "Well, it's a company that's doing

"something on the moon with NASA."

She said, "Well, you don't know anything

"about the moon."

I said, "Yes, but one more letter

"is not gonna hurt."

And anyway, I convinced her.

She wrote that letter.

And that was letter number 121,

from which I got the first response.

To scientists on both sides,

the moon suddenly seemed much closer.

Geologists like Alexander Basilevsky

had a new sense of purpose.

Our group was selecting landing sites

on the moon, and it was very intensive work.

We worked late at night.

We looked on images, we counted craters,

we counted rocks and engine use.

We read data for months because

they use this data for design,

for computer simulation of landing and so on.

That was a beautiful time.

That was probably a first time in my life

when something which I was doing

was necessary to other people.

It was crucially necessary for them.

At that time, what knowledge we had of the moon

was fragmentary but tantalizing.

Telescopes had revealed

bright highlands called mountains,

and dark basins called seas.

There were round craters

that looks like the tops of volcanoes.

But how old it was, and what it was made of,

and how it came to be, all this remained a mystery.

Scientists hoped that samples of rock

brought back from the moon

would provide the answers.

In the early '60s, there were three theories

about where the moon might have come from.

First one was that the earth and the moon

had just grown grown side by side,

had been close together the whole time.

Then there was another theory that

well, maybe the moon just formed in some

entirely different place in the solar system,

and later on, it came in and got captured

into orbit around the earth.

So then there was a third theory that

maybe the earth was spinning so fast

that it spun the moon off;

the moon just sort of flew off

like a drop of water off of the spinning ball.

Discovering the origin of the moon

because the stated scientific goal

of the American lunar program.

The first fresh insights came from the missions

to look for landing sites for the astronauts.

The ranger probes were dispatched Kamikaze-style,

sending back close-up pictures of the moon

as they smashed into its surface.

The first images showed something

that almost no one had expected,

and that is, that at every scale,

the moon was covered with craters;

not just the big craters that astronomers

had seen before and thought were volcanoes,

but smaller craters everywhere;

craters that couldn't possibly be volcanic.

And the only thing that could make craters

and pits of all those different sizes

was probably meteors falling under the lunar surface

and leaving their scars on the surface.

Ranger transformed the ideas about the moon.

This was a cold, lifeless world

battered by meteorites.

But it still wasn't clear what it was made of,

or even if it was solid enough

for a human to walk on.

Then came the next Soviet triumph.

Luna 9 touched down safely on firm ground.

And the little probe had another surprising story.

When Luna 9 hit the moon,

of course, the signals would cease to (mumbles)

and we thought that was the end of the affair.

But to our astonishment, the signals reappeared.

And this was a facsimile transmission

which, in those days, was used

for transmitting photographs by newspapers.

Well, of course, we had no facsimile machine.

But fortunately, there was the Daily Express who responded

and immediately sent out the necessary equipment

after our affirmation.

We saw before our eyes the astonishing thing,

actually rocks of the moon appearing.

These were the first pictures

transmitted from the moon.

The pictures were rushed to press.

But the scoop of the century nearly caused

an international incident.

Next day was a big scandal.

In our newspapers, they said that

Englishmen, they have stolen our pictures, our data.

These British scientists read our data and then

British media published our pictures

before we did this.

I was very angry.

The pictures showed in remarkable detail

a surface of shattered rock.

A dead world.

Meanwhile, Farouk El-Baz was training

the first astronauts who would walk on this rock.

They were fighter pilots.

They had no training in Geology,

so to get these pilots to think like geologists

and behave like geologists,

we knew that we had to train them well.

High in the volcanic mountains of Arizona,

a little piece of the moon was recreated on earth.

This field of craters, seen from the air,

precisely matches a view

of the sea of tranquility on the moon.

My role was really to teach them

how to record observations from orbit.

For instance, right here at this crater site,

we will bring them to the field

and so they can see it,

and they will take them in a Cessna aircraft,

close to the ground, and flying over it

to see what they can see from orbit.

And then we take them in a deeper crate,

flying at 25,000 feet high,

and with the tip of the T38,

it simulates the exact speed

of the spacecraft over the moon.

Working with astronauts, we became very close friends

and they gave me the name of "King"

because my name is Farouk, and I came from Egypt,

and King Farouk had not too long ago.

So that became the nickname that they used

during the mission.

They would say, "If the King's down there,

"tell him this and that," so

it was really very nice.

Alexander Basilevsky never worked

as closely with the Soviet cosmonauts.

Their training was done in the utmost secrecy.

Every month, he would travel

to a secret base in the Crimea

to work on the Luna project.

Here, the engineers were busy testing

an eight-wheeled vehicle called Luna cart

that could be driven remotely on the moon.

It's 35 years since Basilevsky first came here.

First time I came here,

this area looked very different.

There was no grass.

It was just sand there and rocks

and everything mimics lunar surface.

This was so-called lunar ground.

The crew spent here hours and hours

to train themselves how to drive

along lunar surface.

They used to learn how to stop,

how to move, how to drive

along these craters like this one.

All this experience was very helpful for them

when they started to work.

Next came Luna 10,

the first probe to orbit the moon.

It beamed down the international

to the party congress.

The Americans feared the next craft

would carry a cosmonaut.

But the Soviets were most cautious than they seemed.

I had free from the hours my Soviet contacts

when they intended to send a human being to the moon

and their response was always, "When we could be

"absolutely certain of getting him back alive."

They did not believe that the Americans would do this.

And in fact, it's that the Americans

did take considerable risks.

This transmission is coming to you

approximately halfway between the moon and the earth.

The Americans captured their test flights

and took a gamble.

On Christmas eve 1968, Apollo 8 carried

the first man around the moon.

Our systems are go, Apollo 8.

Okay, Apollo 8, go.

You're riding the best bird we can find.

As they disappeared behind the moon,

they lost all contact with earth.

Never before had humans been so far

from our planet.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Apollo 8, Houston.

Apollo 8, over.

Hello, Apollo 8, loud and clear.

Roger, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.

That's affirmative.

You're the best ones to know.

It seemed that a manned landing

was just a step away.

For the first time, the Americans

seemed to be ahead in the race to the moon.

Sergei Khruschev can now reveal

that the race need not have been so hostile.

Kennedy twice approached my father

with the idea to join efforts on the moon.

First time, it was in June 1961,

and my father rejected because he thought

it can hurt our military security.

Then second time, it was in autumn 1963,

and my father was ready to accept this invitation

and he told, "That will be very important.

"We will save money and we will, maybe,

gain politically and technically so it was possible

that it will be one American astronaut,

for example, Neil Armstrong on the moon

and second will be Yuri Gagarin.

But soon, American president was assassinated

and new president never repeated invitation to the moon.

It was not long before

Khruschev himself was ousted.

The two leaders who had began the race

would play no part in the final battle for the moon.

The Soviets had one final hope

of upstaging their rivals.

The prepared Luna 15,

a robot that could land on the moon,

scoop up soil and return it to earth automatically.

Perhaps, they could solve the moon's mysteries

without risking any lives.

The Soviets saw the opportunity of a great coup

in getting brought back automatically

without endangering lives.

After all, if the Americans lost lives at that stage,

then the repercussions would be tremendous.

This is Apollo Saturn launch control.

We can now count down for Apollo 11,

the flight to land the first man on the moon.

In July 1969, both sides prepared for lift off.

Luna 15 was first off the launch pad.

Just three days later, Apollo 11 joined the chase.

Thirteen seconds.

Once again, Jodrell Bank was listening.

We're tracking Luna 15, and to our surprise,

the signals abruptly ceased,

and it became clear quite soon

that this Lunik had crashed

over the moon's surface.

I'm gonna step off the LM.

That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

You're going too fast on the panorama.

You're gonna have to stop for...

When Luna 15 crashed on the moon

and we knew that Apollo 11 landed safely

and they are bringing samples,

it was a complicated feeling.

It was a mixture of jealousy and disappointment

but we still were very strong

and we understand that we can do this

the second time, the third time,

but we were not the first.

Beautiful view.

Isn't that something?

I accept this in desolation.

The astronauts began gathering

samples of moon rock to bring back to earth.

We'll get to the details

of what's around here but it looks like a

collection of just about every variety

of shape, angularity, granularity,

and every variety of rock you could find.

In the Soviet Union, the inquest

into the Luna 15 failure had already begun.

With most of the team away from Moscow,

one of the few left was a scientist

who had made maps of the lunar surface, Natalya Bobina.

Three men and their precious cargo,

21 kilos of moon rock, have returned to earth.

Scientists couldn't wait

to get their hands on the samples.

Geologist Harrison Schmitt was more impatient than most.

He was one of six civilian scientists

selected for astronaut training.

Their hopes of flying to the moon weren't high,

so Schmitt felt that these samples could well be

the closest he would ever get to the moon.

It was an excruciating period actually having to wait

in order to get your hands on the rocks.

It was mixture of joy that we had accomplished

what we set out to do,

and anticipation because we now have

something really to work on

to begin that process of understanding the moon,

its age, how it had formed,

and what it meant to us here on earth.

The moon rock was almost identical

to the most basic kind of rock on earth.

It was basalt, which forms when molten rock

from inside the planet seeps through the surface,

then cools and solidifies.

The first rocks turned out to be

3.9 billion years old,

and that was older than most people

had even suspected.

And so, as we went through these

really spectacular rocks,

we were learning for the first time

what the moon was all about.

Soon after, the Soviet's

second attempt to the moon scooper

brought back a few grams of soil

from a different part of the moon.

The early missions provided the first evidence

for scientists trying to understand

how the moon had formed.

Had it grown alongside us?

Or had it once been part of our planet?

Or could it have formed elsewhere

and been captured by earth's gravity?

When we got the rocks back from the moon,

we saw that the isotopes of oxygen

in the lunar rocks

were exactly the same as on the earth.

Now the reason this is important is that

we have meteorites from other parts of the solar system,

and each other part of the solar system

has a different composition of these oxygen isotopes,

ratio of one type of isotope to the other.

Moon has exactly the same as the earth.

So that seemed to rule out the idea

that the moon had formed far away

and made it much more plausible

that the moon was something made out of

the same material that the earth was made out of.

But if the moon was made

from the same stuff as earth,

there were still puzzling differences.

Jay Maloch was once one of the team of scientists

struggling to make sense of it all.

I think probably the most prominent thing

about the lunar rocks is they're so dry.

There's not a single molecule of water

as far as we can tell, on any of the lunar rocks.

And that kind of amazing fact

strongly supported the idea that the moon

must have come from some place else.

If it had been spun out

early in the earth's history

or had grown together with the earth,

we'd expect it to have water in it.

And yet, other facts suggest

that the moon could not possibly come

from somewhere else.

That kind of conflict among facts was what led

the scientists to be very confused at that time

about the origin of the moon.

Scientists were not helped by the fact

that all the rocks found so far were basalt,

rock that had once been molten

and flowed through cracks

in the moon's ancient surface.

No astronaut had yet found a piece

about the original surface itself:

primordial moon rock that might cast new light

on the moon's formation.

If ever a geologist was needed on the moon,

it was now.

Apollo 15 was built as the big science mission.

I was assigned to a backup crew for Apollo 15

and that began a process that looked like

I might have a chance to go to the moon.

But then soon after, that mission's began

to be cancelled.

The Apollo 20 was cancelled, 19,

and then Apollo 18 was cancelled.

And so it began to look like

the chance was getting small,

and so my anticipation to find a mission

was not very great at that time.

Apollo 15's goal was to find

a piece of the moon's original surface.

Scientists predicted it will be paler than the basalt

and made of larger crystals.

Hadley rille, a gigantic canyon a mile wide.

Astronauts Scott and Irwin traveled farther

across the moon than anyone else.

I can't believe we came over those mountains.

Babe, we did.

This is a beautiful little valley.

The flyover, I think.

They set about their task

of finding a piece of ancient rock.

Look at that, look at the almost in there.

Guess what we just found.

Guess what we just found.

I think we probably came forth, crystal rock, huh?

Yes, sir.

This crater's a goldmine.

And there might be diamonds in the next one.

Scott and Irwin had found a piece of rock

sparkling with mineral crystals.

It was as old as the earth,

four and a half billion years.

It came to be known as the genesis rock.

It was not basalt but anorthosite,

a much more complex rock.

Geologists knew that the only way

this rock could have formed

was if the moon had once been completely molten,

but a body as small and cold as our moon

should have never been that hot.

The moon's birth grew ever more puzzling.

But the genesis rock was almost overshadowed

by another discovery.

From orbit, what looked like cinder cones,

the tops of volcanoes, was spotted by Al Morton.

Okay, I'm looking right down

the electron now at a very interesting thing.

It looks like a whole field of cinder cones down here.

He had absorbed my instruction

and he said, "Hey, tell the king I see

"a whole field of cinder cones."

He wanted to let me know.

And his observation from orbit

resulted in the selection of the Apollo 17 site.

And that is a real proof that the observations

by an astronaut could make a real difference.

If these were fresh volcanoes,

could it be that the moon was still an active one?

Apollo 17 was the final mission.

On board was Harrison Schmitt.

He had finally got his chance,

the only scientist ever to fly to the moon.

Field is good.

Standby to shut down, standby.

He landed in the Taurus-Littrow Valley,

the site of the cinder cones spotted by Apollo 15.

The beauty of the place was certainly

not lost on me, but once you're there

and you sort of slip into the

mode of being a field geologist,

and it's your profession,

you got three days to practice it in this

very remarkable location, beautiful location,

and so you go ahead.

On their second field trip,

Schmitt and Cernan made their way

to a crater called Shorty.

It was five kilometers from base

and they were running dangerously short of time.

We don't have so much time.

I know, Bob, I know.

By the time we arrived at Shorty,

we knew it was gonna be a short stop.

Half an hour, really, is all we had

because of our oxygen supply.

They have 29 minutes from now

but remember they left just a little bit late.

We had anticipated, though,

that we might see something exciting there

in the event that this was really a volcanic crater,

so I headed over to the edge of the crater,

and on the way, I scuffed up

some orange-looking material at my feet,

and that's when the whole excitement started.

There is orange soil.

It's all over, orange.

Hey, it is.

I can see it from here, it's orange.

The orange soil looked like

evidence of recent volcanic activity,

a find that could challenge everything

the earlier missions had discovered.

I've got to dig a trench, Houston.

Fantastic, sports fans, it's trench time.

In just half an hour,

Schmitt and Cernan gathered all the orange soil

they could lay their hands on.

They gotta leave at the third time

they gathered so what they got.

We got to pull out.

We'd like to leave a (mumbles).

These were the last men to walk on the moon.

We had a nearly full moon,

receding at fairly quickly from us

but still with several hours and that

one could look back and really start to think

about where we had been.

That was probably the most emotional time for me.

And I really felt choked up about it.

The orange soil did indeed

turn out to be a volcanic jet.

But it was ancient.

It seemed that the moon had, after all,

been inactive for billions of years.

Lunar exploration was not quite over,

for a year after the Americans had gone,

a Soviet Lunokhod rover was roaming the surface,

revealing thousands of landscapes never seen before.

Finally, it started to end the heat.

I told the bosses,

"Okay, tomorrow morning, Lunokhod will die

"but let's die, as we say in Russia, with music.

"Let's go, not along the smooth surface

"but let's go to nearby mountains.

"We were afraid to go there because of risk

"of this very dangerous surface."

But I was rejected, said, "No, no, no,

"we should know the risk.

"So we die without music."

None of the missions have provided

the answer to how the moon was formed.

But they had discovered

that it was as old as the earth,

that it was made of the same rock,

but had no water,

and had once been completely molten.

So what possible theory could make sense

of all this?

By the early 1970s, fresh ideas were emerging

about the origins of all the planets.

The early solar system was thought to be

a violent place, with many worlds

growing rapidly and competing for space.

These new theories led William Hartmann

to look again at the evidence

from the lunar missions.

He came up with an intriguing idea

for the moon's origin.

When the earth was forming,

it wasn't the only object at that distance

from the sun.

And the second biggest object

naturally got very big

and eventually, fairly laid in the process

when the earth was partly grown,

crashed into the earth

and blew a lot of material out there.

So the moon then grew from that

debris swarm around the earth.

Hartmann suggested that in its early history,

the earth had crossed paths with a world

the size of Mars.

Somehow, earth survived the collision.

The swirling mass of debris combined

to form the moon.

To many scientists, Hartmann's idea

seemed almost too far-fetched to believe.

When I first heard about this theory

that Bill Hartmann had put forward,

my first reaction was almost shocked.

I didn't believe it.

I was pretty sure that in a weekend,

I could do a few calculations

and show that what they had proposed

simply couldn't work.

In fact, it took work with

the biggest military computers

to try to fill out the holes in this theory

and begin to realize that, really,

it could work after all.

The more people considered it,

the more Hartmann's theory seemed to fit

all the known facts about the moon.

It was originally part of the earth,

so its rocks would be the same.

The heat of the collision explained

why the moon was once entirely molten,

and why any water in its rocks had vaporized.

It is now over 30 years since we left the moon.

Since then, probes have flown to the

outermost reaches of the solar system,

to the giant planets and their moons.

They showed that ours was not the only moon

to have had a violent birth.

At Uranus, Miranda's bizarre patchwork surface

suggests that this little moon

was once blasted apart, then reformed

and settled back into orbit around the planet.

And perhaps, the rings of Saturn were once a moon

which collided with another body and shattered,

the debris remaining suspended as a set of rings.

Everywhere in the solar system,

there seems to be evidence of violent origins.

You get a system of planets where they all have

fairly regular properties.

They're all going around the sun

in the same direction.

But superimposed on these regular properties

are bizarre, strange properties.

I mean, one will have a big ring system,

another will have a big satellite,

another will be tilted over,

because of these few big impacts that happened down

through the sequence of formation.

The American and Soviet missions

brought a unique insight into the turbulent past

of our earth and moon.

They also transformed our view of the planets beyond.

Going to the moon has lifted all of us.

It lifted humanity.

Out of the bounds of the earth,

we realized that human beings can leave the earth

and explore some other planetary body.

And in many ways, what we learned about the moon,

we took to Mars and Venus and Jupiter,

and other planets in the solar system.

And it really was the stepping stone

for human beings to follow the vision and imagination

and begin to explore the whole universe around us.