NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Gerald J. Wasserburg, Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Emeritus, on the John D. MacArthur chair at the California Institute of Technology, part 3 of 3

You The basic problem with regard to getting science in a major national enterprise or technological enterprise is that the scientific objectives are not included in it, nor does science part of the management or the decision making process.

And that result, the issue is really how you get people to recognize that science's and scientific return is part and parcel of what the total achievement will be. In the case of Apollo, the problem was to bring some human beings to the moon and return them safely as a major and incredible national accomplishment. That's very different from doing science. And when puts on pieces of technology and science, which are illustrative, but the actual scientific content then no longer is the actual objective and then the question is how you get any science into it and put any resources into it and change things around to get something done. And I wrote an article, I was in the same volume of a thing that a nationalics and aeronautics that then fund Brown Road a review in at the end of Apollo, which I call it the Moon and Six Pents of Science.

Staying with me, there was really not either much money or much effort seeing that science was done in the Apollo program as it was initially laid out. In particular, when you have a major problem like putting people on another planet for the first time, the well-being of these people and the ability to return them is a dominant issue. And all of their activities are then governed almost solely by the survivability of these people when they're safe return and the scientific things are marginal and the scientific things which are done there are more in that particular case, but it's true in many other cases. There are examples, but not necessarily really deep science. They're done as examples to show what yes we can do or accomplish something under these circumstances and exhibit the capabilities of human beings in these very difficult and strange places. When did it change in Apollo? Well it changed, it changed in a very difficult and slow progressive period when after the return of the samples in which the main problem after bringing the Apollo astronauts back safely

was to go through a quarantine procedure because some horrible notion existed that we were going to contaminate the earth with moon bugs and wipe out all of civilization that way. We have that problem now with Mars equally well and one has to respect what's out there and what we bring back and what's here that we send out. So forward and back contamination must always be an issue, but it was an obsessive one where that became the major thing. In fact, what I suggested frequently is that we should catch the module in a condom, a pie and then hold it up because it was all contaminated inside and outside with moon dust and moon rocks and astronauts were contaminated and ocean if you're going to contaminate the earth was a good place to splash all this horrible material in. So it was almost an obsession with back contamination which if you think of the Fort Dietrich people and people who seriously do problems with highly infectious diseases which are truly lethal it becomes an almost impossible task.

The turnaround came when suddenly after the Apollo 11 conference it was suddenly realized that the materials themselves were in fact an incredible treasure of scientific information and that that was the real deep result which would have in addition to the technological and human and national experience and world experience I might say for Apollo because it was so widely recognized for what it was that the scientific objectives then began to be enunciated and people could begin to be talked about it. I'll give you an example we had problems in getting attention paid to what to be done with the samples and how do you get science support for the samples. The total amount of money originally put in for studying the return samples was so small that it would simply be a bankrupt operation there was no investment made that because the main problem was the disposition of the people and bringing them back safely.

There were a small group of us called which were called the Four Horsemen which were Jim Arnold, Paul Gast, his pictures over there, Bob Walker and myself who managed to recognize that the scientific objectives should be if not overwhelming the substantial part of the issue. Did you guys manage to keep the J-missions going? Oh yeah I'll try to get that so we finally didn't know what to do because it was project was run in the fashion which I indicated and partly due to the lack of interest by the scientific community and finally we managed to get to the White House, the science advisor and explained that we needed places to take care of the lunar rocks and to examine them and do things and that then became clarified and when we tried to intervene with what the astronauts were doing for example this then there was a very high level commission which met in Houston and we had to testify before them and I can

tell you an example when Bob Gilruth for whom I have a great deal of regard and respect said what is it that you people want? Well also we tried to then indicate some specific operational things which affected what the astronauts did were very helpful and extremely knowledgeable and intelligent people like one for example if you have a rock out and it's facing the sun it collects wind from the sun on it so you have information about the sun on this rock sitting on the moon because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere like the earth does. So one question that we asked was well it would be nice to know which way the rocks were pointing whether they were up or down and what the top and the bottom was because that made any enormous difference. Well suddenly people began to realize we were not a bunch of crazy people but had some very sensible practical things which we wanted to ask which would have enormous implications and results and as this progressed after a while there was then a dialogue when Paul Gas and I managed to change some of the tools on the lunar missions so that samples of

small of rock fragments could be collected called a rake sample rather than just have buckets of moon dirt or regolith and chunks of large rocks. So it took quite a while but when things began to get ironed out and people knew that we were not just mad people and recognized that something important was happening then there was a desire to help and it did help and funding began to come in to support the program who were just actually just people looking at rocks that was not very meaningful. Well a story about the J-Missions is more of a complicated one. There were four of us who worked very closely together and those were the four horsemen, Arnold Gas, Walker and myself and Gas was then inside of NASA and was very knowledgeable what was doing and I was working partially inside of NASA and it was very clear that the

desire to terminate the missions was very large to find a new major program which in fact was tug and shuttle and setting up a lunar base as a major objective to use remaining Saturn V which meant that they were going to cancel the J-Missions. What point was this? I have to look up the dates but there's a thing hanging on the wall where I hired a secretary in that office out there and sent out I think zillions of letters documents to every member of the Congress and the White House and there was even a great big her block cartoon indicating that the Apollo missions will be canceled because of lack of funds and that's hanging up the wall. I made that and got his permission and circulated that through the White House. We finally made enough of a fuss for people to realize that they were expending these vehicles without utilizing them for the purpose that they were developed and the scientific

and potential returns were enormous and enough brujaha came out due to the interaction of people inside the agency who knew what was going on and was happening or was planned to happen and those of us in the outside working together in many hotel room smoke filled or not all over the country and stimulated our colleagues and many other people to appeal to both the Senate, the House and the White House until finally the message came through that in fact the missions would be saved. We did not know that until one day there was a request saying that two people would be invited to the White House to have dinner with the president. So two people were at least likely to be invited it was Paul Gasps or G.J. Walserberg, so they invited it was Arnold and Walker and at the end of dinner with President Nixon and the way to the prior to departing they said thank you Mr. President for inviting us scientists and space craft engineers here and Nixon said let me see if I remember correctly

15, 16 and 17 at which time that we knew we had won and those missions were saved. One question has come up as to why I call the lunar rocks the return lunar samples the holy grail and the reason was as follows there were two major accomplishments or three major accomplishments associated with the Apollo missions. One was the incredible achievement of putting people on another planet which was not simply an achievement for the United States for the achievement for the world that is in all of history I have a very simple standards of excellence it is if you do something that's really good enough then regardless of what civilizations will follow you in the history of the world however it comes out they will have to recognize that you really did something very very important and write that in the history book. So that was an achievement which is just

absolutely monumental. The next thing was a national thing in which it gave Americans an enormous pride and an accomplishment for which they had very very good reason to believe at a cost of a couple of six backs per year per person in the country. Lastly then these were accomplishments of a majestic nature but the actual substance the proof that we were out the moon and the information that was to be gotten from that which could be milked for a long period of time by intensive study with the rocks themselves. They had to be both preserved they were the evidence that were in photographs like I remember when Paul Gas was very very ill in the hospital and there were aides in the hospital who thought that the pictures of the astronauts cavorting around the moon this was Apollo 14 was something that you guys did in Hollywood movie set and they really couldn't believe that this was for real. Those rocks were for real

there was no possible way that they were from the earth or were synthetic and they had with them the history of another planet and of a sister planet and the study of them then really had to be the longer term reservoir from which the valuable things could be gotten of enormous implications. When we tried to take care of the rocks the question is where would they be curated or taken care of since they were in quote just rocks and people know rocks are not worth a lot must they have gold in them or diamonds or platinum. So we tried very hard to have a lunar curatorial facility created with the responsibility residing with the agency that in fact brought the samples back and see that they were taken care of and subject to scientific investigation for which Senator Proxmeyer had the the insight and generosity to award me the Golden Fleece Award for 800 pounds of walks up along in a wheelbarrow. That's kind of the answer to the thing. Great terrific. What's there to divide between the scientists and the engineers with an

Apollo frame that for me briefly if you would? How would you characterize that? Well I think one is that the engineers didn't have a hell of a lot to do with the scientists and the functions were so enormous and the charge to them was an incredibly difficult charge so that the scientific functions were peripheral to the main goal of bringing people there and bringing them back and therefore the planning and the utilization of resources were mostly dominated focusing on human beings in space. It took a while before people realized that the scientific community when it began to become serious which wasn't in the beginning since many scientists didn't really think we're going to bring any moon rocks back that when the when it became serious and the interactions which I alluded to before took place. Suddenly there was a feeling of mutual respect that these are not crazy people asking for absurd things are asking for useful valuable times and resources to

accomplish something useful and valuable which were achievable and I'll never forget Rocco Patron was one of the great guys in Apollo walked up to me once in Newson and he was a big man and big hands and he had this big long finger and he poked at my face all right up I noticed what do you scientists want but when it was all over we were very good friends with the enormous amounts of mutual respect so I think working together and knowing that there were legitimate requests that were balanced that were not idiotic respected the charges of the mission and legitimate scientific needs and resources would be allocated to them that was what was necessary. All right now Apollo 11 take tip. The first lunar conference was an incredible event it was extremely exciting there was a seal on what people had to say until they got to the conference so it was all surprises there are many people there who were the spokesman of the field

senior scientists some not so senior who had access to grind had ideas had all sorts of conceptions about what another planet was going to be like this is the first other planet from which we had samples prior to the lunar sample return from Apollo 11 all we had rocks from the earth starlight light reflected off of planets and meteorites which were debris from some planets that broke up now we had the first piece of another planet and the whole world changed it changed in a variety of reasons and Apollo 11 certainly brought people together who each had their own particular specialty and most of them had no concept of what evolution of a planet was like at the end of that conference suddenly everything that people had said before it was forgotten it was nonsense even though at the conference there was a big summing meeting with I think 2000

people in the room and four or five people get up and said absolute nonsense some of them were very good friends of mine but reciting what they believed to be true and all of the data show this was absolutely not what another planet was like so this then changed the whole world and we then had discovered that we could take from these small amounts of material and infer enormous things about the evolution of the planet including I might say the earth and the solar system which were never available before and we were forced to because we had limited amounts of material but lots of skill began to talk to each other to find connections between what person A did and what person B did so you then mixed up people from they weren't just people were looking at rocks to find out what the rocks were in terms of simply straight pathology or geology but you suddenly had people saying this has solar wind in it this has solar particles in it this has neutron

induced radiation effects this is due to some impact effect this has a certain age which does or does not fit into any ideas we had or chemistry and all these people began to talk to each other and that was from my point of view the founding of the planetary science community in a real sense you had a bet with Gene Shoemaker what was it who was well I won the bet that's sorry that's the bet the question was there are views of the moon it was a very old object it has the moment of inertia like pretty much like a uniform sphere pretty close to it and people had presumed it was just a very ancient object and tried to infer things about it but they didn't have any other information Shoemaker and his associates and particularly Flagstaff and USGS had done a meticulous job attempting to map the moon from cratering and following on the original arguments by Baldwin had attempted to determine a chronological history for the evolution of the surface of the moon which also applies to the earth namely somebody or

something is throwing rocks at us and his target is then accumulating holes and after a while you get so many holes and you know what's happened to the object in the history of the target the idea was this was a more or less uniform long-term process well that turned out to be absolutely wrong and in fact so if you use that as a chronometer you would have said that the typical rocks in the moon would be about a hundred million years old and not four billion years old so it was off by about a factor of 40 and he paid off the bet he's honest and imaginative gentleman this changed our whole notion of what the bombardment history was like for the earth for example at about 4.00 billion years ago for eons ago the moon was hit by an enormous number of major objects which makes most of the features that you see in the moon when you look at it with a pair of binoculars the moon shut off at about three billion years ago and stopped having any volcanic activity the problem of why you had five hundred million years a half a billion years after the

formation of the solar system very late bombardment of the terrestrial planets means that some other planets had to break up fall and hit them that's now used as a chronometer for Mars for Mercury and the rest of the solar system now may not even be true but in general the notion of a rather smooth curve was not that at all and we something happened very early when the planets formed and then about a half a billion years later there was an enormous bunch of splats destroying any or implanting things all over both the earth and the moon and lots of Mars and after that it quieted down so we were not looking at a long-term accumulated uniform evolution but one marked by two major episodes and then a very very quiet one great did Baldwin get it right? I think Baldwin did a lot right I think that he was one of the great pioneers he really recognized that impact cratering was a dominant thing on the moon and Harold Yuri then followed

up on that but there was no doubt at all that Baldwin basically described the issues analyzed the dynamics of it and it was a great man and all done in the kind of an old American way he's an industrial industrialist who just did this for a hobby because of his experience in knowledge and developing impacts and explosives and a great man. I'll be glad to say some about you and I have to think about that a little bit I would not want to say anything bad about it because I respect them enormously but I don't want to make the statement which I made because that that set some teeth off when I said it but that's what I think you know in a probability you spoke about two different Apollo's yeah now do you cover that pretty well you're talking about the Apollo before 11 and after right? No

more sample more good documentation more ground covered on 17 than we did on 15 but 15 was the first one we'd ever used to rover 14 had the lousy little carrier you know so I don't want to call it the zenith I just want to say it was a demonstration of improving science all the way through reaching as far as we could go and then it quit was I bitter about it's quitting I was unhappy but I wasn't bitter in science we've we've got to learn that we can only do what we can afford to do and we just make them we're piggybacking. One more roll good excellent that was great I just want to get a couple of questions now some some of questions like we're going towards now you know should we go back what did we miss opportunities you know by by quitting when we did one thing that's still in in in the the realm

of the time period is the site selection were you happy with the site selection for for the Apollo edition 84 I'm 183 now if Okay, roll 84, Dr. Silver, take one. Select selection with