NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Leon "Lee" Silver, Ph.D., Professor of Geology at the California Institute of Technology, part 2 of 4

How did you become involved in the appalling program? Well, I was a long-term student of meteorites and other materials, and when the announcements about the scientific opportunities were made, a number of people here at Caltech who had been working on meteorites, thinking about the moon, decided to participate, and we got involved in building labs to prepare to receive lunar samples. When I say we, one of my students and I might do it, and I had already done some anticipating about the nature of the rocks that would be found in the moon. So in the late 60s, almost about 68, we started building labs to analyze lunar samples. Unfortunately, we had construction barriers which didn't get the labs done at the right time, but nevertheless I got some samples, I did some sample work, so I analyzed stuff

from Apollo 11's recovery, and it wasn't, but several months after that, that Dak Schmidt started playing his pivotal role. Another thing you should know is that the chairman of the division at that time was Gene Shoemaker. So, and Gene, of course, had hired Jack and had lodged him on his path to astronaut training. So we had known each other. How important, while we're there, how important was Gene Shoemaker to this Apollo program, and to what we managed to do in the moon? He was central, more than any single man. First of all, he was the PI on the unmanned exploration of lunar surface, where we had a lot of technical difficulty getting the Ranger series completed and then getting into the surveyor series and what have you. But Gene provided the continuous intellectual justification for the science parts of it, it was Gene as a detailee from the US Geological Survey to NASA, who helped construct the

plan for the original science to be done. Gene was the kind of guy who he was so smart and so fast, and he could pick up things. He began to see where the various kinds of geochemical measurements and physical measurements and other things would come together, and so he influenced us all. We got pretty disgusted about some aspects of the program. It was one of the things that I think you'll find that Rocco Patron remembers with some regret. If you've ever talked to Rocco about Gene Shoemaker? But Rocco admired him. How can I say the very different ways? He built the Astrogeology branch from zero. He's a guy who really led the understanding of what impact features were. He was killed, he was still out there trying to understand the impact features all the way around.

It was he who constructed the time scale for the flux of large objects in the terrestrial part of the solar system. He's done so many things, he's just been central. What was the, what were on Shoemaker? What was the defining moment for him when he said, I can't matter here. Now I've traced it as Apollo 12 site selection. I'm not sure I understand it all and one reason I don't understand it is because I knew that Gene was in poor health at the time, very seriously ill and struggling to maintain all of his obligations and keep things going. He kept running into a problem that was inevitable, engineering concerns about successful, successfully taking man to the moon and coming back and the intellectual questions, the science questions had to be done. I don't want to give you explanations, I'm not really that familiar with it. Most of these guys had, they all had bachelor's degrees, some of them had master's degrees,

one or two of them like Jack had PhD's, my buds. I never had buds as a student so I'm not going to talk about it. But first and foremost, they were test pilots. They all had been to test pilot school, advanced test pilot school, they were observers. Their lives, lives depended on their being observers, some of them had been fighter pilots and their lives depended again on their being observers. So what I was trying to do initially, when we set up the first field trip, that was with Apollo 13, prime and backup crew. And you may remember that the Apollo prime crew, Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes had his backups, John Young and Charlie Duke, who became the 16 crew. So that was a very important combination. I wanted to convince them that they could make important contributions to the science.

That was my whole theme. And the first week in the desert, in a place I picked, where there was nobody around, that was my major effort. And by the end of it, Jim Lovell was convinced, Fred Hayes was an enthusiast, John Young was in love with the science, you know John Young, you understand. Charlie Duke was there and it was wonderful. For half of that time, Jack Smith was a participant. And Jack played a very critical role. Jack was the spur to the interest of the astronauts in the science parts of their missions. He wasn't as effective with some crews as he was with others, but there is no question. Jack made them know that the success of their missions would be built in large part, historically, on their contributions to the science. And of course, I played on it, everybody else played on that all the way through.

Not by saying, you owe us this, but by saying, look at the opportunity you have in there. And some crews understood that immediately. Okay. I think we know, John. I haven't. I haven't. No. Well, the crews were selected for all the obvious characteristics you didn't like. It was a more impressive selection process than anything we ever do for grad students here at Caltech. And we're a pretty good school. Physical fitness, intelligence, record of accomplishments, devotion, dedication, and all that other stuff.

And they had it all. And when they could see what the assignments were, and that was part of our responsibility by arm, talking about the science team, and they just came on like gangbusters. So the first thing you have to know is probably the best individual group of graduate students that I or any other professor ever had, it's like that, okay. But you had to persuade them. And like any good grad student, you have to keep them focused, have to make sure they keep their eye on the big picture, and you have to continually update them, understand. So did you have any, did you have any reluctance from some of them, I know some of them were reluctant? Did you feel, not just from the astronauts, but there was an engineering meets science? Well, there is a very interesting part of that. Most of the engineers I had to deal with were the engineers in the flight directorate. The flight directorate, the flight controllers, to understand, were also extraordinarily

selective. Give the credit for that to Chris Kraft, okay, who did all the selections. Once these guys saw what we were doing in the field, and one of the major things that I have to emphasize is, while I was training the cruise and geology, they were training me in space flight, in timelines, in physical capabilities, and there was a melding that had to be done over and over and over again. And there were times, like I remember Dave Scott, genial Dave, you saw the other day, when Dave would chew me out, because he felt we were wasting time. But that's just what he should have done, and then I would do my best to make him understand that maybe we weren't wasting time, you understand, but he didn't quite, but it always worked because we had a communication back and forth going on. And so let me say, when the flight controllers came out, and we ran an exercise, first time

we had flight controller controllers with us on a trip that I was on, was when I took the Apollo 13 crew, I and Gene, and a bunch of other people, took the Apollo 13 crew to the Nevada test site to look at craters, and controllers walked along behind us. And all I were doing was listening. And what I was doing is I learned what it took to communicate with the crews, the US Geological Survey in support of this whole effort, was putting together a team of backroom scientists. We'd work by radio. The crews would do their thing, the team in the backroom would be taking in what they were telling them. And then when it was all through, I'd do a critique to understand, and I'd talk about how it could have been done better. And then they'd tell me how it could have been done better, and it worked back and forth. And a very important element to this was that when the crews that finally flew like in

landed, like 15, 16, and 17, they knew who the guys were in the backroom, there was an understanding of how each astronaut operated, and it became a working system to understand this was a team effort. You never saw us, we weren't in the mocker, that big room, we were in a little tiny room and back, which had its own interesting history, episodes, and what have you. Thank you.