NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with James W. Head III, Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University, part 2 of 3

Well, one of the things that happened in terms of the relationships and the engineers was trying to learn a little bit more about how each of us approached the job to better work together. I think Gordon Swan and a couple of the other geologists had the idea of trying to bring the flight directors and some of the engineers out to actually see what it was like to be doing the geology, which was just a brilliant idea because it was the same as us working in the back room and the science room or working in mission control so we could see what the decisions they had to make in a basis of the data that they put into it so we could better understand what their constraints were. So when we got them out to the co-so's hill, they went through the whole thing. Where they watched, they saw the complexities, they saw what we were trying to do, the geological objectives, they realized how difficult it was to achieve them and the discipline you had to have and the kind of feedback you had to have between the scientists and the

astronauts while they were on the moon. And I think it was a major change in their perspective because after that, as we began to get to know each other, they had a new respect for what we were trying to do and of course it wasn't just a one-way street. We really understood the critical aspects of the safety of the crew and the constraints that were involved in landing and all these other things that made the decisions that they had to make, you know, difficult decisions too. So that was a major change in the thinking, I think, and an evolution towards understanding each other which really was synergistic in terms of the overall goals and objectives of Apollo. Jumping back one, Wassaburg described Apollo 11 to me as a demarcation point. We knew everything about geology up to Apollo 11 and then after Apollo 11, everything changed. It's basically the way he said it. In other words, it was a real seismic shift in our knowledge. Even from those few samples we brought back, describe for me if you would how important were the samples from Apollo 11 in terms of geology, big picture?

Well, prior to the time when we returned samples from the moon on Apollo 11, we only had Earth-based telescopic images and photographs from orbit and a few little remote sensing measurements to tell what was really going on on the surface. Apollo 11 allowed us to know what rock type made up the lunar mory. It was basalt. They were lava flows. It helped us to understand what the ages were by getting radiometric ages back in the lab. We found that they were 3.7 billion years old, not 100 million or 5 billion or whatever. That was crucially important. And it helped us to understand the diversity of things that were going on. What the soil layer was really like. What the regolith or soil layer was formed of and that rocks could be actually formed from this process of impact. In addition, there was the seismological data, you know, other kinds of things. It really got us to understand, begin to understand something about the interior of the moon and so on. And the whole array of processes that they were able to explore just simply in a few meters around the landing site really changed our opinion and just our basic knowledge about

the moon. So when Frank Bournemont says to me, you know, I don't care about any of that, we beat the Russians. That's what matters. Well, I think it's really important to put this in historical context. If you said we want to go back to the moon and do a Apollo again, there is no way you could justify that expense on the basis of science alone. It's absolutely clear that the reason we went to the moon was because of the competition with the Soviet Union. Absolutely no question about that because you could not have marshalled that effort on the basis of science alone. However, having done that, the science we got out of it was absolutely fantastic. You know, the country and the scientists and the engineers worked together to maximize that science and we got back many times over what we would have gotten if it had just been a political, essentially, victory in terms of the fact that we put the flag there first. I know you've worked with the Russians since, but in those days, what were the Soviet aims geologically, scientifically? Did you know? Did you have any idea? What was the, what was the, what were the thoughts around the science community about?

What about the Russians were after? Well I think that not, there was very little knowledge of what the Russians were after at that point. It's scientifically. And knowing them all over the years, subsequent to that time, it's clear that they were doing pretty much the same things. My colleagues now in Russia and the Soviet Union at the time worked on landing site selection. You know, they worked on these kinds of things. They made up maps. They looked for places to go, et cetera, but the system was so secretive that even they didn't know the complete picture of what was going on within the Soviet Union. So the goals and objectives were pretty much the same. But I think the United States was a little bit more open to having the scientific exploration be more heavily involved than was the Soviet Union. Now up to Apollo. Sean Bufrin, OK? Yeah. Apollo 15. Yeah. Apollo 15. Four days before the launch, the crew invites you in and they say just clear up any last-minute questions. What was your advice to the Apollo 15 crew?

And you as Apollo 15, so they don't use my question. Well, in the several days before the launch, when we briefed the crew of Apollo 15 before they went to the moon, basically, they wanted to know, OK, what are the final things? And we'd thought about that before we went in there. And obviously, you can be on sensory overload. We'd heard that a lot of people were saying, well, wait, you got to just remember this point, this point, this point, this point, this point. And basically, we'd spent a couple of years training these people in this crew. And so our approach at the time was a little bit more, you know, you know, everything. It's like, you know, things are in pretty good shape. So, you know, do you sort of have any questions of us and how's it gone? And what are your perceptions and so on? There was one thing we wanted to talk about. I remember at the time was I said something like, OK, now, if you're going to stand up and describe things and you're looking off in this direction, it would help us on the ground if you had some names. So that area over there, you could, in the low in the topography, you could call that south portal on the other one, west portal, like a window or something like that. And I remember looking at the crew and they're looking at each other and smiling and kind of like winking their eye and stuff.

And I said, I, I, I, she's, I probably screwed up because, you know, it's too much detail. And then when it got to the moon, I realized that they'd already decided that they were going to name those things for, for the people who trained them. So when they got to the moon, they said, we're looking down head valley. What, what, what the hell was that, you know, and they'd already decided that. So, you know, it was like really funny because I was trying to tell them a suggestion. And they had the presence of mine. Imagine a couple days before launch, they're sitting there, naming things for the people who are training them. That's what it's like to be an astronaut. She's, how did you feel about the 15 crew and the 15 mission? I mean, first J mission. It was a, Apollo 15 was a major, major watershed. You know, it, it was amazing. First of all, it was the most complex site we've been to. We're going to land next to this big valley, you had to fly over some mountains looking up into space, tip over, and then land short of this big ditch. And then you had this rover, which had to work. Nobody had ever driven a car on a moon.

And it had to be deployed from a suitcase, practically. And then driven around on the surface, there's three periods of seven hours each. And you know, some 20, some kilometers. And it worked. And you know, there's lots of little bumps in the road, but it was absolutely fantastic. It was exploration at its best, absolutely no question. So it set the stage for the rest of the J missions, 15, 16, and 17, and it was just beautiful. You know, just beautiful. What about Scott? How was he as a commander? How was he about geology? He was great. Dave Scott is an explorer. He's, you know, we work together on the nomenclature, the names of craters on the moon in the landing site. There's some very, very important historical names there that are related to previous exploration, et cetera. And you may know that he took a piece of captain's, Captain Cook's ship, the Endeavor, to the moon. It's like a fantastic, he had a real vision. He asked me to do some research on a lot of the background on Cook's Voyages and things like that, because he saw Apollo 15 as the first extensive scientific voyage, you know, the spacecraft was named Endeavor and so on.

And really, he had a strong vision of what it was like to be an explorer, and this was a change from, you know, the space cowboys of the earlier times when, you know, pushing the envelope, being the first to do this, I mean, Dave had a real vision of what was going on and he carried the rest of the crew, you know, with that vision and the program as well. And that really introduced the J missions. So it was spectacular. Was 15 a science success, and if so, just going to be one or two of why, what highlights? Apollo 15 was an amazing science success. Actually at the time, the thing that met people's, grabbed people's attention was the so-called Genesis rock. We had talked to the crew and briefing them about the fact that they were at the edge of a big mountain, which had the ejected deposits of serenetatus and embryo embassons kind of combined there, and it should have excavated deep material from the crust, and so we wanted to look for them to look for a Northocyte, which is a certain kind of rock that has these big crystals that have planes on them, because that would be the deep crust that we could look at and understand.

And Dave went up to the side of the mountain and he's looked over and he saw this sparkling crystals glinting at him, which is rare for the moon. And he said, Houston, I think we've found what we came for. And that was it. It was dubbed the Genesis rock because it was like the piece of the deep crust and that was just one thing, you know. We learned, we looked at the origin of the lunar real, the sinuous real, we got samples from that, we dated the basalts in the area, we got ejected from another set of craters to the North, we did more analysis found green volcanic glass and it goes on and on and on and on. We're still making discoveries from those rocks. Now why did you choose elbow crater as a landing study? There was a discussion about, there were five points along the real and the front of the mountains there. This one combined the most different objectives, and one of the key things that we wanted to do here was to get as many different things as possible because that's, you could use the rover to get away from just a small area. So by landing up near the elbow crater, net referred to a bend in the real, there was

a crater there, a shape like an elbow and basically the, that enabled us to get to the real, to the mary, to the base of one of the big mountains of the Emberian basin, the rings of the basin itself, and to a secondary crater cluster which meant material had come in from a crater hundreds of kilometers to the North. So there were four or five fundamental objectives which we could achieve by getting to that one place alone. And that maximized the usefulness of the rover and the multiple astronauts on the surface looking at these different things. Cut. Terrific. Pretty. during missions, while the astronauts were on the moon, we would be in what was called

a science support room or the back room. And this is about 25 feet from mission control that you see on TV. And the group of scientists involved in the thing would be there. And there would be one person who could actually then communicate. Usually it was an astronaut. Jim Lovell was at one time, for example, who would communicate with the capsule communicator and the flight director. So that was how we would get information to the crew on the surface of the moon. And while it may seem an indirect participation, it was pretty direct at times. Because, of course, you don't want a bunch of crazy people running around, calling up, saying, do this, do that. Because, I mean, like, you know, you have to have a real chain of command for all these systems. There's absolutely no question about that. And working with the engineers, again, was one of those things where we realized that there was a good reason why the input had to be filtered and had to be specific. And where, you know, one could say it really concisely, et cetera. So the way it would work is we would watch the astronauts on the moon, through the television, et cetera. We would plot their course. And if there

was, if they ever they had a question, they would send the question down. Or we would say, hey, you know, on the base of what you said, it would be better to go over here. We would discuss it. And then the person who was in charge like Jim Lovell on Apollo 15 would talk to the capsule communicator or the flight director. And then they would either yay or nay to send it up to the astronauts. And we actually had communication several times. It changed the course of the exploration, for sure. Talk to me about 16. Why that landing site? What we hoping to get out of it? Well, on Apollo 16, it was the first time we'd been into the deep lunar highlands. Okay, 15 landed at the edge of the big mountains, et cetera. But nobody really gotten into the core of the central highlands. And it appeared on the basis of smooth terrain and some hills that there might be volcanic activity of a type that predated the lunar marae. Certainly that was the prevailing hypothesis for the origin of some of the terrain in the highlands. And so the 16 mission was going to test that idea. What did it look like? What was that volcanism and what did it look like? Was it a different composition? Did it represent

a different phase of the moon? And much to our surprise, it wasn't volcanism at all. When John Young and Charlie Duke got down on the surface, everywhere they looked, there were impact breaches. And one of John Young's classic understatements on the way back from the moon, he said, well, I guess this is going to send a geologist back to the drawing board or wherever it is they go. And yeah, we were in the bars where we were, you know, but basically it was really amazing because if we hadn't gone to that site and if John and Charlie had not been such great observers and gotten the samples, et cetera, we'd still be thinking that there was this incredible phase of the evolution of the moon that doesn't exist. We don't think it exists at the present time. So that's why you go. You go to explore. You go to test ideas and a policy 16 with John Young and Charlie Duke was really a major accomplishment there. Okay. Was that good enough for 16s? Well, of course, we've been working to train all these people, the astronauts to have some kind of recognition of the geological problems and be able to undertake the kind

of observations one needed. And they were great students. I mean, the best students I've ever had in terms of learning all this geology, lingo and things like that and really understanding what's on the moon. But we were tremendously excited to think about the possibility that a geologist, a profession-trained geologist would be able to go as well. So we were anxiously hoping that Jack Schmidt would be, in fact, chosen for the last mission. And Jerry Shobber, a colleague of mine from the USGS and I were in Houston and we heard the news on a radio that he'd been selected. And so we raced over to Jack's apartment. I grabbed my briefcase and ran over there, you know, and we just pounded on his door and he comes to the door. He hadn't gotten the formal word yet. So we were at a first to tell him, which was a great excitement and he was, we were all really excited. And this was back in the days when he passed out these free little bottles of liquor on every flight and I couldn't drink them all. So I had a briefcase full of these things. So I popped it open, you know, and we celebrated

it. It was great fun and the grand tradition of geology. Well, it's a story we're going to tell you about Jack. I don't remember. So Apollo 17, you pushed for the landing at Shorty Crater. What was Apollo 17 to you at that time? Why was it important? Well, I think that, you know, we, again, we knew, of course, that the number of missions had been curtailed. And so it made it even more important that we get multiple objectives. And one of the things that we had determined was the relationship of some of these impact basins to one another on Apollo 14, Apollo 15, and so on. And also we learned a little bit about the range of ages of the volcanism. And one of the bases we hadn't been to was Serenotatus. And in addition, there was this volcanic kind of like looking deposit called a dark mantle. It was very dark material. It seemed to be strewn all over the mountains and local areas. And it looked to be overlying a lot of geology as if it was relatively

young, relatively recent. So the idea was to try to combine these multiple objectives, get to a place where you could sample the rocks on the side of the Serenotatus mountains. And also into an area where we had to start a mantle to see if it was actually really young volcanism. Because that would cap, you know, our understanding. It started here, say at the Apollo 11 like age, and then ended here at Apollo 17. So, you know, this is really important for us to try to get at this. What was the origin of this stuff? What was its age? Had it relate to Serenotatus and so on. So that was Apollo 17. That was the great landing site there. And we almost didn't get in there because the engineers didn't it was a canyon that was like smaller than the ellipse for landing of safety. So that was a problem. And we that was I think a classic testimony to the success of the engineering scientist interaction and understanding came with Apollo 17 because there was a ellipse that represented the safety margin for landing around a particular point. When you put that

on to the valley that represented the Apollo 17 site, it went up the side of the mountain. And it's a no-no to have a mountain in the safety ellipse. And so we went, oh, you know, how are we going to do this? So we sat down with some of the engineers and we said, gee, you know, this is really important. Can't we figure out a way to do this? And a couple of the people who've been on field trips with us, the engineers looked at this and said, hmm, let's just let's think about this a little more. So we had a meeting and the engineers came in and said, no, we can't do this for this and the other thing. And the two chief engineers said, go back and see if you can make that fit. So they came back to the next site. You know, it just fits. And that's where we landed. It was great. And you know, they all knew that every one of the engineers had a little bit of margin as they should. And so when he went back, everybody took 10% off that and just squeezed it down so it fit. And it wasn't a question of safety. It really did fit. And so it was great. So that's where we went.

Do you think Gene started any hesitation whatsoever that he could pilot that thing into that? Oh, yeah. Gene, I'm sure would have told him he could have landed on a dime. No problem. Yeah. So, um, cut for a second. On Apollo 17, you know, we went to see if in fact this manaling deposit, this dark manaling deposit was in fact young. And that was a key thing. Was it the youngest volcanism on the moon? And one of the beauties of exploration is you go to test ideas to find out what really is going on. One of my colleagues used to say it could be a, it could be, it could be C, but don't forget D, none of the above. Okay. And in fact, that's what it turned out to be because the dark manaling actually when the samples were brought back was dated at the same age as the Apollo 17 assault. It wasn't young like a billion years or half a billion. It was actually about 3.5, 3.7 billion years old. And that completely changed our thinking about how all this stuff was in place, et cetera. And you may remember when the astronauts were on the moon, when Jack Schmidt walked up to Shorty Crater, I mean, he was really excited. And because he could see this orange discoloring. And of course, we thought it might be young.

And usually young deposits associated with volcanic activity have fumes and things like that that discolour the surroundings. And so he thought, maybe that's what we're looking at here because there had been almost no colors on the moon other than that. So it was really exciting because we thought, hey, maybe it really is young. And then we get the samples back and it's old. And that's not a disappointment because that's why you go. You go to test these ideas and have the slats kicked out from under you in terms of your understanding. So you can really understand what's going on by learning new things. Ultimately, as a question for later on, but I'll ask it now, could we have accomplished, was it worth sending men to the moon and why? Because you know, lots of people said we could have done the same with machines and robots. Right. I think it was definitely worth sending humans to the moon because, you know, there's a couple of aspects to that. One of them is you could construe ways in which you could do a lot of this with robots. And a productive system of exploration of the moon at the present time and in the future is with any planet is through, you know, large scale robotic exploration.

But I think there were two things going on here. One of them is that there was a sense on the part of the nation that of really reaching out and exploring. And I think the aspects that have to do with pride and prestige, pride being how we view ourselves and prestige, how other people view us, is really important to say nothing of the fact that the most common experience I've had when I've been with the astronauts, when they've met other people, is that people want to share that experience. I don't get that when I go out and talk about all the robotic exploration. I mean, I get a lot of excitement, but nothing like that. Okay. So there's an element to human exploration, which I think is well worth the cost because it takes you absolutely long and you can really experience it as a human through these other people. So to that level from a human experience, absolutely worth it. And there's no question that the intellectual aspects of making the choices and going to the places that you see when you're on the moon also had a major significant impact. I can say one story about that on Apollo 15. I mean, you know, the astronauts are on

the way back, driving back on the rover to the lunar module. And we had talked to Dave and Jim about the fact that if you see any rocks with bubbles in them, you know, get them because they, that's the gas expanding in there and we know what the gas is inside the moon. So they're too long back to the rover. It's at the end of the time, they're supposed to be in the lunar module and, oh, Dave Scott looks over and he sees a rock with bubbles on it, he's sitting over there on the side, puts on the brakes. And of course, they're not supposed to be stopping here. Let me cut. Sorry. I want to take you back on that we'll change the frame size. All right. Cheryl, last one. It's amazing. It's the last board. It's the last board.