NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Gene Cernan, NASA astronaut, aviator, and engineer who was part of Gemini 9A, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17, part 2 of 3

Well, sometimes not to sound self-serving, but Apollo 10 is almost the same like to forget and flight, yet without that link between Earth orbit on Gemini 9 or on Apollo 9, when we flew the lunar module for the first time in Apollo 11, was what we learned and what we did with the lunar lander and the command module. You know, we're on the second flight to the moon on Apollo 10. Without that link, I think perhaps Apollo 11 might have had several surprises. Sort of the supergotten flight, but an important one and it was certainly a part of my life and having been in the moon on that trip, I knew I had to go back. I knew that there was something there that I hadn't yet finished a job that had yet to be done as far as myself, as far as the challenge I personally faced. Perfect. Okay,

let's just talk for a second about the scientist astronaut, okay? Okay. And be honest, when they first started to appear at these geologists and scientists and so forth, they first started to show up and talk about what they wanted to accomplish up there, how warmly were they received by the astronaut? When the scientist astronauts were selected, they were all nice guys, but who needed them? You know, I mean, they can't fly. None of them knew how to fly. We had to send them to fly school. Some ended up to be fairly good pilots. Others didn't take to it at all. But we couldn't figure, we were being trained not to, we were engineers, we were aviators, we were test pilots, and by God, if someone wanted to be a geologist, we'd be that too. And you can only do so much on the moon. I mean, you're not in the laboratory, you're an observer. You're going to gather information, you're going to see, but we had to be smart enough to be able to take in and capture everything we could capture while we're on a moon. We had to be, we had to become, if you will, lunar scientist. Lunar,

maybe some of my lunar geologists, observers weren't on a moon. But hell, we were astronauts. We could be anything we wanted to be. We were a little, a little arrogant. There's no question about it. And it was, and for every scientist that flew, one of us would not. Seats were very, were very competitive goal in life. And so I, I believe in retrospect, we felt that the scientists were, were sort of shoved upon us by the scientific community. We'd already been in the moon by that time. I don't know a couple of times. I'm not sure where we're about to go to the moon. And, and people again to say, well, you know, after you go to the moon and land, then we're going to really make it a scientific adventure and mission. So you need scientific input. You need a little bit more expertise than you guys and you high flyers and you test pilots can, can bring to the program. But they assimilated themselves very well into the program. Although it became very obvious until, until down the line that none, probably none, if any, were ever going to fly in Apollo. So they,

they were, they were tremendous help to us both in, in the physical sciences and the geologic sciences in preparing to go to the moon. But none of us wanted to give them a seat. When did you begin to, when they, when you started to do geology training, did you find yourself beginning to change a little bit about, hey, you know what, maybe this is, yeah, man, this is, maybe there's something into this. Well, we all felt that the major objective was getting to the moon and, and getting home. I mean, that was our major objective in life. But we're all, I think we're professional enough to realize that, hey, you know, once we got there, we still had a level of performance to maintain. We had to do something. We had to make our stay worthwhile. Whether it was six hours or three days, we, we had to prove our worth in being there. And so, yeah, I think we began to take the science, science of the mission a little bit more seriously. You know, you got to understand that we were overwhelmed every

scientist in the world wanted to put an experiment on our spacecraft. Whether we were on a way to the moon, whether we're on the moon or where it was. And there's only so much time to do so many things. And everything seemed to take a little bit longer in space for some reason. And we're always behind schedule even on a surface of the moon. So we had to look at it and say, let's get realistic. We can only do certain amount of things with the time we have left. And of course, underlying that was, was a safety factor. You know, we didn't want to jeopardize our position, but, you know, but we did stretch it out with the lunar rover. And we did a lot more things than even I anticipated we would ever do. But we did get more serious about it because once we, but Apollo 15 became the big, the big step in the scientific exploration of the moon, 15, 16, and 17. How did you prepare for 17 scientifically? Where did you go, where did you go? Well, I think my preparation for, for the science on Apollo 17 probably started when we, when we first got into program because we started taking classes in geology as well as

other things. We went on geologic field trips, which was sort of, wow, and this is geology, you know, and we went to craters and we went all over the world and, and, and began to understand what the lava was and volcanoes were and, and just got a broad base. And then some of us, most of us got involved in Germany. And of course, we just put the geology away. We were on a different path. We were trying to learn how to run over and do all the things we needed to do in Germany. And then, then I, I worked on Apollo, basically Apollo one, Apollo seven, things transitioned over the fire. And there was no geology involved. It was just proven that we could get, it was a test flight. We were test pilots again. See whether we get a spacecraft up there, whether it would work, whether it would do the thing we wanted it to do. It became a really started training for geology when I backed up Alan Shepard on Apollo 14. I was a backup commander. And we really got serious, you know, we knew now by that time we could get to the moon. Every flight was a first, quite frankly though. We knew we could get there. We knew our systems. I knew the spacecraft. I knew both the spacecraft. I'd flown them both.

I'd flown a lunar module in the moon. So, so, not only as a, as a backup commander, as as possible for supporting the mission and making it easier for the prime crew, now we really got into the geology with the tools we had. We didn't have a lunar rover at that time. And we knew walking on a moon was going to be a little difficult. So, we had to sort of plan our mission and try and, and try and accommodate all the geologic requirements we could for that particular landing sign. It became very interesting. I, I find myself, I'm not a geologist. I think I've been trained very well to be a good geologic observer. And I'm not a microgeologist. I like to stand back and look back and wonder how things came about. I like to just go to the mountains that Switzerland or Canada or the US or anywhere and figure out what happened here a trillion years ago. And how did these mountains get uplifted? And what was it like when that glaciers came through? And what could have been going on here? I like to stand back and look at the forest and not get too caught up in the trees

because there's a lot of people who can better dissect the trees than me. What about your first impressions of Harrison Schmidt? When you knew Schmidt, Schmidt wasn't originally going to be on the crew. They bumped deep bumped, right? Jack, Jack is very aggressive individual, very good. I met Jack when he was in US Geologic Geologic service and he was one of our instructors if you want on some of these early geology trips before even got in the space program. Jack was very determined, very knowledgeable, very committed lunar geologist. And, and his dream was obviously to take that experience in professionalism to the moon. And, Jack worked very closely with the folks on Apollo 8 and the folks on Apollo 11 to have them know what to look for, became, became so aggressive at sometimes in some cases. He sort of became a pain in a lot of people's butt because he he never took no for an answer. He, most of us who were military and are sort of a military discipline that we all sort of adhered to and Jack didn't necessarily do that. But it became pretty obvious

that there was a lot of pressure from the scientific community for a scientist to fly in Apollo before it was all over. And, that made sense. And, there was only one geologist in that group of scientists. And, so it made sense that Jack Schmidt to be the guy who has an opportunity to fly shit at opportunity presented himself. And, so he was given a backup crew assignment backing up Apollo 15, which would most probably have led to Apollo 18 to Jack walking on a moon and Apollo 18. He worked hard. He performed well, wasn't the greatest pilot in the world, but he performed well on the backup for Apollo 15. He did Gordon was his commander. And, and he earned, he earned the right. He truly did. He, not the easiest guy to live with, not the most social compassionate individual in the world. But, when it came to doing his job, he did it well. But then all of sudden Apollo 18 was canceled. There was no Apollo 18 and people began to look over the shoulder

and wonder where and when and how this challenge is going to fly. Well, I was a commander of Apollo of the backup crew of Apollo 14 with the potential. There was never every, there was never a guarantee in a program that anyone would go anywhere or fly any mission. Well, with the potential of rotating my crew to Apollo 17, and if that were the case, that would have been the last flight. And, there never would have been a geologist on a moon. That changed, basically, a deac slate in our boss. Got a directive that Jack Schmidt would fly in on the Apollo mission and there was only one left and that was Apollo 17. And so, how he, how deep came up with the crew assignments will never know particularly, but rather than, than taking, taking the crew that Jack Schmidt was not in rotating to Apollo 17, which would have given Dick Gordon the last flight. Dick Gordon would have been the last guy to have left his footprints on a moon. He split up my crew or asked me if I would

accept my, accept that change. And, of course, it's a no-brainer. Although it was very difficult, because Joe Ingle, who would have walked on a moon with me no longer had a chance to fly. He had no slot in Apollo any longer. I will say this to Jack, assimilating himself very well. We worked together very well. And, in retrospect, as you look back, it was the right thing to do. It was a tough thing to do. It was a difficult thing. It was difficult for a lot of people. Things could have been different, could have been, should have been, would have been kind of stuff. But, in retrospect, I think Jack and I made a very good team. He was a scientist, he was a geologist. I looked at geology from a different point of view. I challenged some of his, his thoughts. What's 17 Mark? What's 17 in your estimation of geology and engineering success? I think 17 was a culmination of everything we tried to do from Mercury, right on through Germany and Apollo. It was a culmination of what Kennedy said when he declared we would go to the moon

and do the other things. He said, and do the other things. And, I guess, we ended up doing a lot of the other things. I mean, we had the mobility of a lunar rover. We had the experience and we built and grew upon the experience of the other flights that had gone in the moon. You still got to get there. You still got to get back. Apollo 13 is still a possibility on any flight and any given time. And we knew that on Apollo 17. After I saw the Apollo 13 movie, I wondered why I went back. But nonetheless, we felt very confident in our spacecraft and in ourselves. And therefore, we were able to stay over three days. We probably could have stayed for. There was still a little conservatism we got in this far in the space program. Let's not mess it up now. Let's not leave a few guys in the moon. We don't want to have a major problem now. Let's just conduct a good mission and bring people home. Tell me something. Tell me about the landings. What was the name of it and why that one? Well, there was, being the last flight. I mean, everybody had some

place we wanted to land. And, you know, even Jack said, let's land on the backside of the moon. Well, you know, is that beyond possibility? No. But it would have taken a satellite back there for communications and a lot of other problems. But, you know, Jack wanted to do something geologically that had never been done before. And I admired him for that. And I deferred a great deal of the geologic planning quite frankly to Jack. Because it made sense. And I think it was one of the smartest things I did. And we were all involved into the termination landing site. We wanted to go into a very mountainous area. We wanted something. There were some geologic things we were looking for old knew that we just we wanted to get to culminate all those other land five landing sites into something we didn't know and understand and try and put the pieces of the puzzle together. We did partially. And we landed in a valley, a valley that we called Taurus literal. It was near the literal, a crater called literal. And it was in the Taurus mountains. And I

don't know if the valley had had a name before we went there or whether Jack and some of his brother and head decided that was a pretty good name. It turned out to be great. The valley was the valley was overwhelmed. It was, was, was, was, picturesque geologic everything. I mean, it, it was a valley that there was some 20 miles wide, five six miles, or 20 miles long, five six miles wide. Surrounded on mountains on three sides that are higher than a grand canyon is deep if you can imagine landing in a valley like that. Well, we pitched over and we were landing and we could begin, and I was starting to fly to our landing site. The mountains were already above our, our level. Just magnificent. We had, we had, would appear to be landslides. We had big, what we call big gigantic mountain maceafes on one side. We had an escarpment. It was almost like a stair-step dam on the other side. I believe someday if you could have gotten millions of gallons of water and filled this valley up, you had had the most beautiful lake in the world.

So we had everything geologically there that I think people, people were looking for. Although we, there were sites like Tyco, the big crater Tyco we were looking at and other things. This site turned out to be a, from a, from a, a, a aerodynamics point of view from a fly to site was very challenging because it was no longer on the equator. It was northly the equator and was very, very, very on the eastern edge of the moon, which meant that as we came around the corner, around the limb of the moon, the ground didn't have much chance to look at our spacecraft and check it out. We had to be sure that we were in good shape when we started down. So things had to happen very, very quickly. It's a good site for many reasons. It, as I say, was a culmination of every, of all the challenges we'd faced on all the previous Apollo flights. What was, tell me the story of, when you first landed, what were you trained to do? You trained to pop up and look around and do a geological survey. Describe that. Well, the first thing that happens when you land is you experience the most quiet moment

you're into our lifetime. I mean, when you're coming to everything's dynamic, it's shaking, your, your, your engines are running, you're flying, you're landing and you get close and, you know, you're jack talk and you're listening and you got dust and all of a sudden you shut down and wow, you are now in, you were no, who are no manners ever been before. It's quiet, it's still, there's nothing moving, there's no, there's no wind, there's no trees, there's time and you look around and you are looking at, it's almost like science fiction. I mean, I'm looking at these mountains, I'm looking at these craters around us. We just landed on another world somewhere in this universe. That's the way I felt. And of course, the first thing we , the first thing we wanted to do was make sure we were capable of getting out of there if we had to. And once we were satisfied, this spacecraft was still in one piece and there were no hisses and pops and noises and what have you. We began to open our eyes wide and begin to look out and see what we could see and try and describe a little bit of, about what we were looking at and,

and the magnificence of it all. The, I think it was described by, by one of my peers as magnificent desolation and that's what it was. But, but we were truly the first flight, maybe the only, well, if we were the first, we were certainly the only because we were the last to land in a valley that had these magnificent mountains just surrounding us, encompassing us on all sides. And they were very, they were very prevalent. You couldn't really appreciate the size of them because you had no trees, no telephone poles, no cars, no houses to gates, to gate size and distance with. And, you know, often times I go into the mountains now and I keep thinking, you know, that's a make, that's, that's high, but I'm, but when I was on a moon, mountains I were looking at which twice as high as the top of the, the Rockies era from, from a valley in, in the middle of Colorado. So, all right, you get in and out for your first EVA. How long were you out? I don't want to get into that, the rust colored soil. Well, we picked that up, I think, I think on the second or third day, but the first EVA, our primary goal was to get out there and get acclimated. We had to

get all our tools together. We had to unload the lunar rover, the car, get it operate and get it loaded, get it running. And we had a major, major scientific package called LSAP, which, which we were going to set up, which eventually stayed powered up. We have put a little nuclear generator in it in a state powered up for some 10 out of years, sending information to walk guys. I don't remember how many experiments, but 10, 12 experiments that were tied to this all set package. And we'd practice and practice and practice. And we knew how long it would take us and, sure enough, we got in a moon and it took us longer than we anticipated. But we, but we spent the majority that we were out three, on three EVAs and three separate days for effectively seven hours each. You know, we're out there 22 plus hours on the surface of the moon. And the first one, we were, we spent most of our time setting up the scientific package. This is one of our, this is what we went there for. This is one of the things we did. Got a little frustrating at Jack, because that was just a job he had to do. He wanted to get on with the lunar geology and we really anticipated we'd get into the, into the geology aspect of the

mission about halfway through that first EVA. But we didn't, because it took longer to do all these other things. But we did get that package set up some of it malfunctioned part way to go back and check it. That was frustrating. But once we got, once we got that behind us, we took off in this first EVA and we had predetermined pre-planned. I mean, this was not a hit missing. We knew where we're going. We knew what we're looking for. We wanted to be flexible to change, to change our direction and change our time either with recommendations from the challenges on the ground who are following us or from what we, we could make some decisions to do that ourselves. But it was not like, well, we're here. What do we do? Let's go take a picture of the mountain. I mean, we spent hours and hours at hours planning on what we're looking for. We were going to drill and did drill core holes down as much as eight or ten or twelve feet in the surface at certain particular spots, looking for certain particular things. And so we went to many of these states, not all of these stations were pre-planned and pre-determined. When we found something a little bit

more interesting, like on, we found the orange soil. We were driving to these geology stations and we were doing geology while we were driving. Jack was picking up samples. We were taking pictures. We were one of the most important things about the geology on the moment is your descriptions of what you see. Compare them to things that you've seen on earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground wouldn't know what you're talking about and then take pictures of them. So in real time, if you'd say, listen, I've seen this lineation over here, which we didn't anticipate, which has got some changes to it that we didn't look for. Wait a minute, let's stop and take a picture of that. So our geology continued while we're driving. We get to a particular station. We do, we'd have certain tasks at that station because the geologists from pictures they had seen previous wanted to look and get answers to some questions. And one of these stations, which was Shorty Crater, I think it was the second day or so, we were, Jack was digging a trench and I was over

doing some other geology work. A lot of times, most of the time we worked together but sometimes we had tasks where we were separately. And he yells out, hey, you know, it's orange, it's orange. I found orange soil. Now, the moon is bland in color. I call it shades of gray. You know, the only color we see is what we bring or the earth, which is looking down upon us all the time. And the fine orange soil on the moon was number one, not anticipated, a surprise. And when I heard Jack say that, I knew this geologist had been on the moon too long. I knew, I knew he was running out of oxygen or it was time to take him home. And I went over and I said, don't move it, don't move it till I see it. Now, I know how much he saw, whether he saw an orange rock or what he saw. And sure enough, I started over there and I was 10, 15 feet away and I could see that it was orange. The first thing I did was pick up, we have several viruses, pick up my gold visor,

which was a sun visor, to make sure I wasn't seeing something that was being tinted by the visor. And sure enough, I mean, it was orange. And it was truly an exciting find. No one knew what it was, whether it was old, old soil, new soil, soil from oxidized soil and the indication of oxygen or iron ore, deep from the inner surface or whatever. It didn't turn out to be what people thought it might be, but it was a major discovery. And that's why you send people. Great. That's great story. I thought this geologist has been too long in the moment. In other words, it held us in one place. And you can put twist and push and all these things. So we made, we made, Germany 12, a very basic, if you will, easy mission. Buzz proved a lot of concepts that we wanted to prove that we could do. He went out to the superb job. But we made

it so simple. I think we used to call us a monkey board. You know, can you hook a, let me get that. Just roll down. Buzz, I want you to say that. We made it simple. Okay. We took some, some important pictures of the landing site for Neil. Checked out the landing radar. Checked out all the capabilities in the reminder. Had a few problems. We went out of control ourselves around the moon and got a little hairy, probably more so than we anticipated at the time. But it turned out to be a major stepping stone. For a lot of people, things could have been different, could have been, should have been, would have been kind of stuff. But in retrospect, I think Jack and I made a very good team. He was a scientist. He was a geologist. I looked at geology from a different point of view. I challenged some of his, his thoughts and comments and challenged what he saw. I was still a commander of the crew and when it was all said and he fit very well with Ron Evans and myself.