Apollo 16 astronaut reflects on life and God on landing anniiversry

He felt lost by then — unhappy in his marriage, emotionally distant from his two young sons, unfulfilled in his post-NASA career selling beer. But that day, he and his wife, Dotty, finished a weekend Bible study retreat, and in the car afterward, he became a born-again Christian.

If his conversion story ended there, he would have plenty of company. But Duke would, in time, embrace a literalist interpretation of the Bible that contradicted all he accomplished as an astronaut and scrambled his expert understanding of the heavens.

On the triumphant Apollo 16 mission, he picked up a rock scientists reckon to be 4.46 billion years old — a relic of an ancient lunar crust that offers insight into the formation of both moon and Earth — and the long evolutions both have undergone since.

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Today, Duke says he believes Earth to be only about 6,000 years old, and the rest of the universe with it — which is to say, he holds that the scientists overstated the actual age of that rock by 4.459994 billion years.

Charles Moss Duke Jr. is, at 86, one of four surviving moon walkers. He earned his place in history on April 21, 1972, when he and Apollo 16 commander John Young stepped from their lunar module Orion onto an undulating, crater-pocked plain in the moon’s Descartes Highlands.

He was already known to millions of Americans, thanks to his part in an iconic exchange as Apollo 11 made the first moon landing, three years before. When Neil Armstrong announced, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” it was the drawling, quick-to-smile Duke who answered for Mission Control: “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground.”

His own mission, the fifth to land, would eclipse the first in every regard. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent little more than two hours outside their lander; Young and Duke, more than 20. Armstrong ventured only 65 yards from Eagle. The Apollo 16 crew, equipped with an electric lunar rover, drove 16½ miles across a far more challenging slice of lunar real estate. Along the way, the two climbed hundreds of feet up a mountainside, took 1,774 photos and collected 210 pounds of moon rocks.

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They also made one of the most surprising discoveries of the Apollo program. NASA and its scientific partners dispatched them to the highlands on the belief that they were volcanic in origin. “We were briefed that the Descartes region was two volcanic flows, one more viscous than the other, and there was a contact in the plain,” Duke said. “We were to sample back and forth across that contact. So when we got there, we started describing these rocks, and they weren’t volcanic at all.”

Instead, the pair found breccias — mash-ups of different types of older rock, melted and fused together in the violence of titanic meteorite strikes. Scientists on the ground received the news reluctantly. “I got the feeling,” Duke said, “that their attitude was, ‘Are these dummies?’ ”

It wasn’t long, however, before the experts came around. “Everything we said they’d find is exactly what they didn’t,” said Jerry Schaber, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who was at Mission Control. “But I guess that if we knew everything about what we’d find, there would have been no reason to go.”

The expedition also collected some especially old moon rocks. On the second of their three days exploring Descartes, Young picked up a four-pound chunk of bright white stone that turned out to be anorthosite, a remnant of the moon’s original crust. Sample 60025, as it’s known, is among the most exactly dated prizes of the Apollo campaign, at 4.36 billion years old.

The next day, Duke bagged a dust-covered 10-ounce rock on the rim of the vast North Ray Crater. It was a breccia containing a nugget of anorthosite that apparently crystallized 4.46 billion years ago.

The finds were a bonanza to planetary scientists, because unlike the earth — which is constantly morphing in the thrall of weather, tectonic shifts, volcanism and such — the moon has been dead since infancy. Its rocks are thus archives of not only its own past, but that of its partner in space, which formed at about the same time.

So say the scientists, at any rate.

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Important as they knew their mission to be, Young and Duke stood apart from other Apollo crews for the obvious fun they had. Both were Southerners — Duke, born in Charlotte in 1935, was raised mostly…