NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Leon "Lee" Silver and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt at Sunset Crater, part 1 of 2

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You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

You You You

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You You You Just look for a little while, and then try to organize a description of what they're seeing on the surface. Now, the particular kind of lava flow we have here is called an a-a flow. That's a name from Hawaii. And you see many angular broken fragments scattered around.

That has a reflection of the temperature and the viscosity of the lava, and the rate of withdrawal of lava from beneath the surface. We have a big hole right here, and this big hole was once underlaid by a reservoir of lava. And as the lava ran out down through the flow, the surface just collapsed, and we're looking at a collapse structure on the surface. Would you bring them to a place like this? Oh, very definitely. Tell that back to me, you'd bring them to a place like this, and what would you expect from them? Well, I'd bring them to a place like this telling them that their observations would add to the information that they'd obtain from photography and from samples. Their observations would help us understand the conditions within the lava melt at the time it first came out in the surface. Were they good students? They were the best. Truly the best, no exaggeration.

Tell me that back again. They are a... The astronauts are a very talented set of observers. You cannot be test pilots, which almost all of them were, or a fighter pilot without being a first-rate observer. And they understand that there are implications beyond just describing the color and the shape and the other things, and one of the things we tried to make clear to them is that there was great value in their particular observations. That we could learn by listening through their eyes and their head to what they had to say. Just look out there. Good. We don't have a sweet, Mexican cut. What would you have...? What was an assignment you would give them? In this particular place, the first thing I'd like them to do is to get a good representative sample. Now, on the moon, we never did get to a place that we could confirm that there were volcanic rocks.

We still suspect there are volcanic rocks on the moon. But any place that had a very distinctive surface shape and color, such as we see here, we'd like to get samples which are representative. Now, this is a lava flow. And one of the things about this lava flow is it's characterized by a lot of little cavities which reflect gas that was escaping from the lava at the time of quenching. The gases in the lava are an extremely important question for us. On the moon, we know that the lava flows do have the same kinds of cavities, but it appears they're not made by the same kinds of gases. And one of the mysteries that still remains is identifying the gas, which formed the bubbles in the basaltic lava flows on the moon. Okay? And then what I'd like to do, if it's okay with you, is to pick up or be handling a sample, which shows the...

Go ahead. I'm going to get a good one. I want to get a good one that has... Somebody in the park service want to... Let me see what I can do. I need a rock. And that's two two two. We should... Didn't get our props ready. Right side, it's right down here. Here you go. What do you have there? This is a piece of vesicular... Let me just ask you to go right... Well, this is a piece of vesicular basalt. And vesicles are the bubbles that gas, which is dissolved and then exiled from the lava,

makes as it collects. The lava is still plastic. The bubbles are able to expand at very atmospheric pressure, and we get these very porous rocks. Now we're very interested in both the lava and in the gases, which were once here, but have only left their external forms with a little luck. The right instruments, we might be able to detect some deposits from the gases on the walls of the cavities. Now what would you expect the astronauts to know that? Yes. Oh, they knew that. They knew that very well. And you may not recall that on Apollo 15, along Hadley Rill, that Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, ventured over the edge of the slope and down towards what they hoped were going to be outcrops of lava, just like the kind of material we're seeing right here.

They probably did not quite get to it, but they brought back pieces, which would very strongly resemble this particular piece. Okay. Terrific. All right. Let's see what goes up here. First for the rock. I got it earlier. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Just turn it around a little bit. Okay. Okay. Good. What about closest feet, cans? Mark it. Beautiful. Beautiful. And then come back towards us, sir. Right up here to this side of the camera.

Great. Okay. Chuck Wallamont. Yeah. There was a much briefer tour, but there are some good pictures of you in there. Yeah. And let's see what they get out of it. Have you seen the stuff I sent to make up? Yes. No, I have not seen it. Have you seen October Scalia? No. I haven't gone to movies in a year. No, you ought to see it. It's fun. All right. Right at the end, they show some old 8-millimeter stuff. How did you come to work with training the astronauts? I had had some long standing concerns about the training program. And when I finally completed pilot training and got down to Houston, and after a few months approached Al Shepherd, who was head of the astronaut office at the time,

with the proposal that, like all other training, the astronaut office take over the management of the training of the crews in the science, lunar science, and particularly lunar geology. And he agreed. He said, fine. I had a long memo on what we would try to do. And then my first thought was, how do I line up some people that really can teach field geology? As well as a lot of other things. And I call Lee and Bob Sharp at, also at Caltech, Richard Johns. Dick Johns was up at Stanford at the time. And asked them if they would like to help. And they hemmed in hot a little bit, but as usual, came through. And we decided to work first with the Apollo 13 crew, ironically. And I persuaded Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes and the backup crew, of course, came along, John Young and Charlie Duke. And I persuaded them to give Lee a shot at a few days out in the field,

and it turned out on their own time. And they did. We flew out to LA and climbed in the vans and went out to the Orcopio mountains in Southern California and had several days of intense training, but very different than what they had had before. And the big difference was we started to organize it rudimentaryly at that point, but into simulations, into actual periods of time in which they needed to cover a certain amount of ground and get certain kinds of information out of it. And once we started to do that, we had the attention of the crews. That was much more along the line of what they wanted to do. What did you think Lee, when asked you that? I went over and talked to Gene Truemaker, who was then the chairman of the division in there. And because it meant some commitments of time. And Gene had already been prepared by Jack, so he approved. And then I decided to do, take him to a place where I'd been training Caltech grad students and our advanced field geology down in the Orcopio mountains.

So you decided about the possibility of training yesterday? On top of everything else you were trying to do at the time. Yeah, there were a lot of other calls on my time. But this was obviously important. And Jack was the guy who helped me see its importance. He persuaded me. But I have to say, I was also a laboratory investigator. I was working for the National Research Council. I was doing many other things. I taught all my courses through all of this, too. And we were going to a frazzle. I'm surprised you still here. It did get swearing. Oh, did I get a head splater?