Apollo astronaut admits he nearly died ‘trying to do a high jump’ on the Moon in 1972
A NASA astronaut has revealed he almost died while trying to perform a high leap on the Moon in 1972.
Charlie Duke, an Apollo 16 astronaut, said he almost landed on his back during the silly stunt, which could have smashed his life-support backpack and killed him.
Duke, now 83, retold the story of the "scariest moment of his life" at a recent conference in New York.
The astronaut piloted the lander module during the Apollo 16 mission.
"It was 1972, and there was going to be the Olympics in Munich that year, so we were going to do the 'Moon Olympics,'" Duke, who at 36 was the youngest person to walk on the moon, told .
"We just started out doing the high jump."
The astronauts were just "horsin' around", he added.
While Duke was able to jump four feet in the air due to the Moon's low gravity conditions, he took a nasty tumble in the process.
Landing on his backpack, the astronaut said he was lucky to survive.
"The backpack weighed as much as I did. So I went over backwards," Duke said.
"It's a fiberglass shell, and it contained all your life-support systems. If it broke, I was dead."
Duke said he rolled during the fall in an attempt to limit damage to the backpack but still landed on it.
The Moon – our closest neighbour explained
Here's what you need to know...
- The Moon is a natural satellite – a space-faring body that orbits a planet
- It's Earth's only natural satellite, and is the fifth biggest in the Solar System
- The Moon measures 2,158 miles across, roughly 0.27 times the diameter of Earth
- Temperatures on the Moon range from minus 173 degrees Celcius to 260 degrees Celcius
- Experts assumed the Moon was another planet, until Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his theory about our Solar System in 1543
- It was eventually assigned to a "class" after Galileo discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610
- The Moon is believed to have formed around 4.51billion years ago
- The strength of its gravitational field is about a sixth of Earth's gravity
- Earth and the Moon have "synchronous rotation", which means we always see the same side of the Moon – hence the phrase "dark side of the Moon"
- The Moon's surface is actually dark, but appears bright in the sky due to its reflective ground
- During a solar eclipse, the Moon covers the Sun almost completely. Both objects appear a similar size in the sky because the Sun is both 400 times larger and farther
- The first spacecraft to reach the Moon was in 1959, as part of the Soviet Union's Lunar program
- The first manned orbital mission was Nasa's Apollo 8 in 1968
- And the first manned lunar landing was in 1969, as part of the Apollo 11 mission
Apollo 16 was Nasa's second to last manned mission to the Moon.
Duke was joined by fellow astronauts John Young and Ken Mattingly on a three-day trip across the lunar surface to collect moon rocks.
Nasa recently announced plans to return man to the Moon for the first time in nearly 50 years.
Starting with an unmanned rover in 2023, the space agency is expected to land people on Earth's neighbour in 2024. Over the next decade it will build a permanent lunar base.
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In other space news, Nasa released a video in May teasing its Moon mission goals.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos recently pledged to land a man on the moon by 2024 with a rocket built by his private space firm Blue Origin.
He also showed off sci-fi renders of his plans for giant rotating space habitats that could house a trillion people.
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