NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt, geologist, astronaut, and Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 17, part 1 of 3

Thank you. Soon after I arrived finally at Houston in the summer of 1966, I began to look very, very hard at the management and the direction of the science training program for astronauts. Prior to the arrival of the scientists astronauts in Houston, that program had been aimed principally at the Earth sciences, but at sort of a first-year geology course correctly. And my impression was, very strong impression, was that the pilot astronauts were bored. It was not very interesting to them. And I, after thinking about it and talking with various people around the country, as well as inside of NASA, I

proposed Al Shepherd that we bring that training program into the astronaut office for overall management. All other astronaut training was part of the astronaut office, our directorate, which was the flight crew support director, Dick Slayton being the head of that. I'll agree to that. I agreed to my formulation of the strategy. And with that agreement, I then began to call people like Lee Silver and Richard Johns and Bob Sharp and Jim Thompson and Jim Head and others around the country to see if they would be willing on a volunteer basis to participate as part of bringing the astronaut program into Apollo. And by that, I meant that we were going to begin to teach Earth sciences geology in particular and field geology specifically in the

context of actually running mission-like simulations. That is what the pilot astronauts used to doing in all of the other activities. There was no reason why we couldn't do it with science. And indeed, that's the way the program began to mature. The first crew to really take part in that was the Apollo 13 crew, ironically. And they were by far the best trained group of astronauts to be sent to the moon up to that time, principally because they were willing to experiment and to go out and run this kind of simulation-based geology training. And their interest and enthusiasm for that kind of training was contagious and really went on through the rest of those later missions. How did you find the astronauts in general as being receptive to geology training? Was it very with every astronaut? It varied a great deal. But with one or two exceptions, they realized that after Neil and Buzz walked on the

moon, they were going to have to do something pretty special to stand out in their own minds as well as in the minds of others and in history when they went to the moon. The first man on the moon will always be the first man on the moon and few people really recognize the second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. And so we had a varying degree of interest, but for the most part, most of the crews were very enthusiastic about the training. And we had as a result from Apollo and from the manned portion of Apollo, the field geology on the moon, we developed with the samples a first-order understanding of the moon as a planet. And that was no small accomplishment. And again, I think it's to the credit of George Lowe and Bob Gilruth and Gene Cranes and Sam Phillips and people like that who realized the opportunity for science was there and allowed all of these things to come into play and to allow us, for example, finally on Apollo 17 to basically fully utilize the capability of the lunar module with

22 hours outside the spacecraft. And to bring back record payload of samples, all of which sort of culminated the whole science effort that we were allowed to make in Apollo. Now, how did you figure into these two cultures of the pilot, pilot astronaut, the test pilot astronaut and the scientific astronaut? I mean, hadn't you said you must have walked right down the line. Well, everyone had to find their own path in that because clearly we were not of the culture when we first arrived, although very importantly, and although it may have been done with Malice of Forthought, the idea of sending the scientists astronauts to pilot training with the Air Force was very, very important to our ultimately being accepted because by the time we arrived, we flew T-38 just like everybody else. We could go out and solo in a T-38. We could fly it by ourselves. We could go cross-country. We could fly with other people. We

were part of the pilot culture and had learned a great deal, not everything obviously, but a great deal about it. In a couple years later, we were trained in helicopters just like everybody else who was going to potentially go to the moon with the Apollo program. So that that was a big help. It would made you part of it. You could speak their language almost as as well as you could speak your own. We were still scientists, but we were being integrated into the pilot culture, and I think that had an awful lot to do with it. Now, from the very beginning, I think it was clear to everybody that if one scientist was going to the moon, it was going to be the geologist. If one scientist was going to the moon, it would be the geologist. And so I had a little bit more of an entree. I worked with the guys a lot more. I was helping to manage, in fact, managing their training program on their science training program almost a day-to-day basis. I also was carrying a significant load in managing the engineering from our point of view. From the astronaut point of view, managing

the engineering of the decent stage of the lunar module that had sort of fallen through the cracks. Astronauts were working other engineering monitoring jobs throughout the whole Apollo program, a tremendously important part of the program, which is probably not realized by many, to have the astronauts so deeply involved in the day-to-day activities. But I was doing that as well as any along with everybody else, in addition to helping to train and give these fellows a leg up, if you will, on the preceding mission. The better train they were in geology, the better their mission was going to go in the eyes of history and I think in their own minds as well. I enjoyed the 10 years of flying experience I had very, very much. It was an important part of my life and was

a tough to learn, was a tough for you to get a hold of that fellow. I mean let's face it, you had to do it to be an astronaut. It wasn't something you normally would have. Learning actually to fly and and learning whether you had the hand-eye coordination necessary to fly was pretty straightforward for me. I enjoyed it. I did quite well on what we call the VFR side of flying, the visual side of flying, where I ran into problems initially, was in flying instruments. As being 10 years older than the other pilots who were learning and with the kind of career I had had where I was able to in an academic world and in my world of science to focus on a problem till I had it solved, then moved to another part of that problem, solved that, then come back in a very methodical way. That kind of pattern doesn't work when they're trying to fly instruments. With instruments you got to take this information in, make a slight correction, take this in very, very quickly. You got to keep a scan and that's what they call it,

going to all the instruments and learning to do that was something I really had to struggle with. I finally mastered it and as long as I was flying a lot I did it very, very well. But as soon as for some reason or other like going into space, I had to back off from that kind of training, then I had to get a lot of flying again in order to bring it back. It was not a natural part of my flying expertise. Whereas if I had been 19 or 20 or 21 or 22 when I was learning to fly, it probably would have been very different. I could see that difference in people like the people I flew with, Jean Cernan and others, how they, it was a very natural thing for them because of the age at which they had started to pick it up. I think it was really that ten-year, almost ten-year difference in age that made it difficult for me. Tell you about Jean Schumacher quickly, Jean Schumacher. How important was Schumacher to the, to influencing the program and influencing you? Jean was far more important than I think even Jean realized. He was one, he was

the first truly world-class scientist to get very, very interested in the geology part of the science of space and and to try to influence NASA to take that into account that there should be a field geology experiment that was integrated into all of the other science because without it you would not have the context in which samples were collected and then could be analyzed back here on Earth. Jean pushed and pushed and pushed on that was continually, I think, disappointed and frustrated that he couldn't get everything that he thought was going to be important to such an experiment, a field geology experiment. Were you disappointed when he left in frustration? Did you understand why he left in frustration? I understood exactly why he left in frustration but that doesn't mean I wasn't disappointed and didn't have some very nice and relatively heated arguments with Jean about it. Because of him,

those of us inside could go to George Lowell and Bob Gilruth and others and say these kinds of things are possible. Let's do as much of it as we possibly can within the other constraints that we're having to live with from an engineering and a programmatic and a dollar point of view and the dollars were still important even in those days. Most people think that Apollo had all the money in the world. Well, it didn't. It still had to worry about dollars because it had such a tremendous challenge to make this thing happen. The next time we go, it will be a lot easier than it was the first time. We'll know exactly what we have to do and how to do it. But the first time going through, it was not easy at all. And because though we had that kind of pressure from people of the recognized quality like Jean Schumacher, we could then make incremental gains within the program that were far greater than we ever would have gotten otherwise.