In December 1972 a 130-year-old man born into slavery stood in a Florida swamp and watched the only nighttime Saturn V launch turn the sky red. Apollo 17 was the final crewed trip to the moon, and this episode explores the political fight that put geologist Harrison Schmitt in Joe Engle’s seat, Gene Cernan’s helicopter crash that nearly cost him command, and the launch sequencer glitch that halted the countdown at T-minus 30 seconds.

On the surface, Cernan snapped the rover’s rear fender with his geology hammer, forcing an overnight fix with lunar maps, clamps, and duct tape that Houston delivered to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries. We follow the record 7.6-kilometer drive to the walk-back limit, the orange volcanic glass at Shorty Crater, the 4.5-billion-year-old troctolite 76535 that revealed an ancient lunar dynamo, Ron Evans’s 148 hours alone in orbit with five pocket mice, his deep-space EVA 160,000 nautical miles from Earth, and a photograph from the mission that resurfaced in a 2026 declassified UAP report.

• Why the scientific community demanded a PhD geologist on the last Apollo flight
• How jagged, electrostatically charged lunar dust made a broken fender a mission-ending threat
• The walk-back limit explained as a hard survival boundary, not a guideline
• Transient lunar phenomena observed near Grimaldi and Mare Orientale from orbit
• The Biocore mice experiment, cosmic ray data for Mars, and the site as photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter