NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt, geologist, astronaut, and Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 17, part 2 of 3

With some validity, people often said that you could land anywhere on the moon, and it would be as good as anywhere else, because it was such an unknown place, and there were so many things to learn, and I would agree with that up to a point. However, I do think that given all of the constraints, both psychological and real and engineering, that we did about as well as anyone could have ever have dreamed we would do with the selection of landing sites. Now having said that, after Apollo 13, I and a very small number of other people went to NASA Management, and suggested that we consider in order to bring the program back at a high level, those places on the moon that probably every scientist in the past had dreamed

of going, the North Pole, Tyco, the western edge, or Antali, and the far side of the moon, and used the last missions that were going to be available to us, the last four missions, in order to go to those places. They were accessible to us with the Apollo system, shorter stay times in some cases, but still accessible to us. That got some interest, certainly within some of my circle of scientific friends, but not much interest in a NASA that was recovering from the near disaster of Apollo 13, and wanted with Apollo 14 to show that they still had a system that they could use, and in the face of the political world beginning to back off from even supporting Apollo, as we could see with the cancellations of Apollo 20 and Apollo 19. So that idea of going to these other places was not met with a great deal of enthusiasm,

although I think that it would have been a capstone on Apollo that would have stood this test of time. Even with Apollo 17, when we began to plan where we'd go on that, I surfaced once again the thought that maybe the last mission to the moon ought to go to the far side. That, again, did not meet with a great deal of enthusiasm in even more conservative NASA, and so it didn't go very far, any farther than the halls of the Man's Bridgecraft Center. What were they fearful of? It's just a worry about taking any kind of what might be perceived to be extra risk near the end of the program. People were now on an engineering side beginning to get more interested in the space shuttle and continuing to fly the Apollo spacecraft. There also, I'm sure, was some tendency of the old hands, the managerial hands of NASA to not want to take any new risks so that they would end the program on a very positive

note rather than take a risk that it might be a negative note. But going to the far side was certainly feasible. We worked that out in some significant detail, and even to the extent of identifying two communication satellites that were on the shelf that could have been put into a quasi-libration point on the far side of the moon, that would allow communications directly back to the Earth. So, it was something feasible, it would have cost some more money, and that was one excuse given for not doing it, but I think generally it was just an increasing level of conservatism about using the Apollo system any more in deep space, even though it was a tremendously capable system, and we could have, I think, continued to use it with a great deal of confidence. Take me back to what mission were you originally scheduled on, and what happened to it, and had to feel when it happened? Just that story. The only mission that I actually was ever scheduled on was Apollo 17, but in the normal

course, what was considered the normal course of cycling of backup crews to prime crew status, the mission that Dick Gordon-Vance Brand and I would have had, having been the backup crew for Dave Scott's Apollo 15 mission, would have been Apollo 18, and it was in the course of preparing for Apollo 15, as the backup crew member, that the Apollo 18 mission was canceled. And of course, we felt very bad about that, because we felt that was the one shot we had, although even then, Dick and Vance and I, and everybody realized that their NASA was going to have to think about whether or not they were ever going to send a scientist to the moon. And that one way or the other, as long as there wasn't Apollo 17, that at least I would be considered, and then the question became, would it be consideration of my going to the moon as part of a coherent crew that had already trained together, are to break

up the crew that had been back up to Apollo 14, and we Gene Cernan's crew, and stick me in that crew at the expense of Joe Engel, and that's ultimately what NASA decided to do. Did you feel badly for Joe, did you feel like I'm not going to be able to work with this crew, did they accept you? Well, on the one hand, of course, I think you would realize that this would be very hurtful to Joe, but on the other hand, I was there to go to the moon. I was there to practice my art, if you will, on another planetary body. And I had, like any other astronaut, I had all the confidence in the world that I could train with another crew and become part of that. I obviously, and I think it was clear to several, to many people, that I would have preferred and thought it might have been a better judgment to just replace crews. But that was not what Deeks Layton and others decided to do, and so once it was clear that that's what they wanted to do, I felt very confident that I could work with Gene

and Ron as part of the now Apollo 17 crew. Both of them were extremely intelligent people. They knew that, again, that the learning geology and becoming good geologists in the context of the Apollo mission was important to their success and to the success of the Apollo 17 mission. And so I think that very rapidly the crew jailed and came together and worked as well. It's not better than any other crew ever has. How would you prepare for 17, specifically for the geology part of it, did you get certain excited about it when you knew you were going to Taurus and Lit Trial, just a little bit about how you prepared for your flight in 17? Well, as I've said before, I don't think you had to get Gene excited about geology. He realized that, particularly with the geologists on the crew, that that was going to be something the mission was going to do. It was going to do it and it'd better do it well, or we'd all suffer the reputation consequences of not doing it well.

And so, and Ron Evans worked very, very hard at his orbital mission, which included a great deal of geological observation from orbit. So getting that crew excited about geology was not difficult, as with previous crews, with only one, really one or two exceptions, they did get excited about geology and worked hard at it and became quite good at it, within the limits of not having ten or fifteen or twenty years of experience in that field. One way to look at it is that I would never try to be a professional test pilot, because there are just things you learn through experience over ten or fifteen years that you can't duplicate in one year. You just can't get it. Probably the key factor is that you learn how to sort through the wheat and get rid of the chaff, and you focus on what's important. That's what you learn by being a professional, whether you're in the media or whether you're a test pilot or whether you're a geologist, and experience gives you that capability that you just can't duplicate.

You can't give it to somebody else in a year. It takes time to learn what's going to be important and what isn't going to be important, so you become a much more efficient worker in that field. But within that context, we could make very good geologists out of each of the pilot astronauts, because they already were outstanding observers. From their own careers, as test pilots or military pilots, they had to be good observers or they never would have survived. We knew a great deal about Tars Electro, we had pre-mission photographs, we had three dimensional models, and we had the information that came from other missions about other parts of the moon, so one would have thought that when you landed, you would know pretty

much what you were going to see. Well like any meaningful event in anyone's life, it always turns out to be far more than you ever expected, and to actually be sitting on the moon and looking out the window at these immense mountains that were surrounding us, mountains six to seven thousand feet high. We were in a valley deeper than the Grand Canyon, one of extraordinary geological variability, one that we now are finally going to have a chance to explore. That whole thing caused me to say almost immediately, well this is a geologist paradise if I ever saw one, and that indeed was what it looked like to me. It was brand new country, no geologist, nobody had ever been there before. It was far more than I ever expected to see once we got down inside of it, even though I had studied and planned along with Jean and others, what we were going to do. The whole thing became an extraordinary experience. Once we got out of the spacecraft and you could put this even broader context, you could see this brilliant sun and a black sky with these brilliantly illuminated mountains and craters,

and then this beautiful blue earth of ours up over the southwestern mountains, just giving you a setting that will be imprinted on my mind, and I think on the minds of many others for the rest of their lives. Jean and I, I think, had, through the training cycle, had worked out a very good arrangement for how we would conduct the exploration of Tars Littro, and it was not really one of a leader and a subordinate. It was more one of the allocation of responsibilities. Jean took care of a great deal of the more mechanical aspects that were required at each station

of cleaning the surfaces on the rover of deploying experiments at various times off the rover, things like that, as well as being another set of eyes. One pair of eyes is never going to be enough in a challenging and diverse environment like that, and even though I had the experience on Jean and was able to look around and sort of plan our set of activities, where was this sample going to be taken, where was this court tube going to be driven, where was the best place to set the perimeter and things like that. That was my job. Still, another pair of eyes often picked out something that I might have have scanned over and missed, or have, or would force me to explain very quickly, of course, why we didn't go there and why we went here, and, and, and sometimes we would change the plan. So it was a very important relationship between the two of us. And I would not, at any time, ever remember thinking of it that I was in charge, and

Jean was a subordinate. I think we, outside the spacecraft, we worked together as a, as a team, and one in which the allocation responsibilities, as well as the allocation of observations, was, was very important, and I think very well done. Because of the discoveries at the, what was called station two, at the base of the South and I see, if we had cut into the time available to us at station four, based on our remaining oxygen supplies, when we arrived at station four, that is the crater shorty, it was, it became apparent right from the beginning, there was another impact crater, it was distinctive because it was darker around the rim than others, but still another impact crater. And so we, we felt like we would be able to stay within that time constraint, and very quickly gather some samples from the depth that the crater had gone, because those samples would be on the rim and so forth.

So as I went towards this big boulder on the rim to get a sample from there, I noticed that my feet had scuffed up orange soil, and that's when I, I told Jean, Jean, it looks like there's orange soil here, words to that effect. And it became very, very clear that we were going to spend some time there, whatever the ground said. And so we immediately, without waiting for the ground to come up with a plan, which was why you have human beings on the moon, we went into sort of our routine procedure. I went to the place where the orange soil seemed to be most concentrated, immediately dug a trench, Jean got a core tube, immediately, while I was doing that, we put that, we took samples first out of the trench, then put the core tube down just away from the trench a little bit when the undisturbed material. We went into a sequence of sample collecting and observation and photography in the course of about 30 minutes that I think was probably the most efficient ever done on the moon. Just, just like that, because it was obviously an important discovery, whatever it was, it

was the first real color anybody had seen in aggregate on the moon. And it was important for us to get as much information about that as we could. Indeed, it is something we almost anticipated before we ever left the earth. At this crater, there were two theories before we left the earth. One that was an impact crater, one that was might be of small volcano. And if it were of volcano, then there's the chances we might see colored evidence of colored alteration around that volcano. So when I saw the orange soil, the idea that it might be volcanic and it might be alteration immediately permeated not only my mind and Jean's, but also the people back on earth. And that, the excitement in the Mission Control Center, science room was all related to that. It turned out that it was volcanic, but not what we thought it might be at the time. And there were some inconsistencies that even I, you'll see in the transcript, even I

beat was aware of and didn't like the way we were trying to interpret it at the time. I was uncomfortable with it to say the least. And ultimately, the orange soil turned out to be material from very deep within the moon. Probably the material that at least as much as we know now would negate the idea that the moon resulted as the impact of a Mars-sized asteroid on the earth, and it almost certainly requires it to be captured. That is. Can I photograph this? Was it tough to work in the suits? I talked to Jean about this a little bit, okay? I'm sorry. No, it wasn't this way. Was it tough to work in the suits up there? Did you find that constricting in the time limits of China? The Apollo suit, as good as it was for the time, is not a great exploration suit. In actual fact, after a very short period of time, I suspect your efficiency, relative

to what you could do in shirt sleeves here on earth, is no better than 10, 15, maybe 20 percent, but certainly not more than that. The biggest constraint that you had was not walking or running. You could actually move quite rapidly over the surface in that suit, using a technique like cross-country skiers used, for example. I think you could go 10, 15 kilometers an hour pretty easily, and that's a good speed even for a cross-country skier. But the problem with the gloves, and because they were fixed position pressure gloves, 3.7 pounds per square inch in the glove, and anytime you want to pick something up, it was like squeezing a tennis ball, and your forearm muscles get very, very tired and sore very quickly. In addition, because of the nature of the glove, you start to lift the nail off the quick of your fingernail every time you reach. That combination was really the most inhibiting of anything that we had to do with that suit. In the future, any future suits, NASA must, or somebody must design some kind of mechanical

advantage in those gloves, so that these forearm muscles don't get so tired. Because within 20 or 30 minutes, you are really reduced to a very slow, very methodical use of the gloves just to try to keep at a steady state. Good. And, again, from the photographic house? These missions were planned down to the minute. They were tight. Was that a constraint for you as a field geologist? Did you feel it was a constraint? I had learned early on that it was going to be that way, and you knew it was going to be that way. Big organ used to put a time is relentless, and indeed it is. You're going to leave the moon at a certain time, and you have to work everything in. And you have to get through that frustration of not having enough time to do everything you'd want. Indeed, another thing I did early on in the Apollo 17 planning was to try to get us a fourth day on the moon. That didn't go over very well either.

But still, you can see that I was already knew I was going to be frustrated by the lack of time, and there were many, many things that we could have continued to do, and somebody will probably do in the future to better understand that site. But you learn to live with it, and it's part of your being once you're there because of the training and your own intellectual honesty that this is it. You're going to have 22 hours outside the spacecraft, and you better make the best use of it as you can. Did you have anything special rigged up with the back room, Harrison, about how to make the most out of that time, did you have a plan? Now the main plan was to train together, and the back room and the astronauts did train a great deal together, particularly through the Capcom, the capsule communicator, which in our case for the EVAs was Bob Parker, and we used the core of the back room in most of our simulations. So we were used to having them there. If we anticipated they needed to make a decision, you'll see in the transcripts that we suggested that they begin to think about where they wanted a core tube in this kind of a setting,

which I had described to them. And we would get that kind of information, in the case of Shorty and Station 4, we just have time to wait for them. But we had enough expertise and talent that we could make those decisions too when we had to make them, and come out very well with the decisions that we made. Again, a slower pan in the Peking-type hoodie, okay, so if you want to catch and talk, it's fine, I'll fail you in the talk, okay. Finally on this mission itself, geologically, do you think 17 was the height of the couple Apollo geological thing? Of course. I think 17 was actually the pinnacle of the Apollo exploration program. Now others will probably argue with me, and every crew would argue with me, I'm sure, and that's just the nature of the beast. We all believe that we've, when you actually have, that we've done a great job. 17 was the capstone of the science program because we planned it to be. We selected the site to be the most complex geologically that we felt we had access to.

There was three-dimensional, the mountain's 7,000 feet high, a diverse set of geological units that appeared to have formed at broadly different times in lunar history. We were able to sample and observe and describe and photograph all of those units in the 22 hours that we had on the moon. We met the objectives very nicely, and I think as a result, we were able to pretty much confirm the overall model of lunar evolution that was developing as a result of the information from the preceding five missions and add to it new information, such as what has come from the orange soil, has come from the big boulder at station six, where we saw a contact between two major units, impact generated units, a number of things like that, and the oldest rock that was brought back from the moon from station two, all of these things, I think, added to the wealth of knowledge that now constitute a model for lunar evolution

that in some respects is more sophisticated than our model for the evolution of the earth. Finally, as the only scientist to walk on the lunar surface.