NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Michael B. Duke, aerospace scientist and Principal Investigator for the Apollo Lunar Sample program, part 1 of 2

You You You You

You You Okay, well the Apollo 11 mission was the first US mission to the moon. I was a

Scientist at the US Geological Survey at the time one of those chosen to study the samples and it's gosh it's 30 years ago now, but I can remember the excitement of coming here and getting our bits of material and I didn't get rocks I got some of the soil which is hundreds and thousands of little rocks broken up. We learned a lot from that and people are still learning about the samples now. What kind of excitement was there and what happened to all the rocks? You know after they came in to hear who got the rocks? Well my first experience with the samples was was just as a scientist I picked them up took them back to the laboratory and worked on them. Later on I became responsible for the rock collection. I was the curator of the sample collection here and had a very intimate relationship with the rocks. We had between 100 and 200 teams of scientists around the world working on them and we knew that we weren't going to go back to the moon after the Apollo program for many years. So we have tried to conserve them and this this facility you're in is the conservatory of the sample collection. Most of the material that was originally brought from the moon is actually still here.

It has all been studied but it only takes little pieces to derive the scientific answers and we have maintained the collection here, documented it. We can relate any new sample to any old sample. We have a real treasure of information on the lunar sample collection. How far across the world did these samples go when it first came back in? Did they give you up to a lot of different countries? I don't recollect how many countries were involved but the Apollo program scientifically was an international program and we had people from Switzerland, England, Japan, France, even the Russians shared in the analysis of the first samples. There were many more. I just can't remember who always involved. Everything is so clean and talking about quarantine. What was the fear then? Well the quarantine was actually a regulatory requirement just as if you bring soil from Europe to the US.

It has to go through a quarantine control. Well this was the first sample ever brought by man to the earth from another planet. The same sort of precautions had to be made. We did not want to potentially contaminate the earth with something that had been growing on the moon, some virulent strain. Nobody thought that that was going to happen of course but we still wanted to be protective. So we brought the samples back and quarantined them, isolated them and we isolated the crew for about three weeks after each of the first Apollo missions. What we were doing in France or something like that? No, we didn't know what we were worried about. That was the point. We didn't know what to look for, what might be dangerous. We just wanted to be conservative and cautious with the way we handled the samples.

Yeah actually when the engineers started out on the Apollo program they wanted to fly a mission every three months. So they flew Apollo 11 and three months later flew Apollo 12. The samples were not out the Apollo 11 samples were not out of the curatorial facility by the time the Apollo 12 samples came. There was a big crush after the Apollo 12 mission of course we had the Apollo 13 problem and so it was quite a time to the Apollo 14 mission. But by that time the scientific community convinced the engineers that they ought to give us more time to learn something about the samples that we had collected before we went to the next place. Well we didn't know anything really anything about the moon when we first went there and each mission we learned something new about the moon. We knew we were going to go to different sorts of places but for example the Apollo 14 mission sampled material that was quite different than people had expected. One of the discussions, let's start over again. Before we went to the moon we had just pictures and so you had morphology, you had the shape of the surface that could guide you in what you thought the samples were.

So people had thought that there might be volcanic rocks in some places and other places there might be material that had come out of impact craters which would be fragmental and flow maybe like the ash flows that come out of some of the volcanoes on the earth. So people didn't really were really able to tell from the photographs which was which and that was the kind of problem we faced on Apollo 14. Most of scientists had guessed the opposite to what it was. We got a lot of impact to wretchia material on Apollo 14. Was that a surprise? Well that was a surprise to some people but in those days you could find people who believed anything. In advance they would make predictions and then some of them half of them might be wrong but that's alright because it was advancing science. Talk to me a little bit about what it was like to be at. Did you want to be an astronaut? Did you want to go? Did you train? I never trained. I applied to the scientist astronaut program in 1965 along with a number of people from the geological survey.

And I was fortunate enough to be selected for the sort of final group that was picked from and didn't make it through that selection process. That was the selection that chose Jack Schmidt and Owen Garry at Joe Kerwin and a number of the other people who became scientist astronauts but I didn't make it that time. How did the regular astronauts make you guys all feel at that time? Well they were heroes. It's hard to even be in the presence of a hero and you interacted with them for example in the laboratory. Very subsequently they were the ones bringing back the samples. We talked to them about what they had seen where they picked up this sample, what they were doing, what its relationship to other things were. So we had intercourse to them and we got along very well with the astronauts.

If there was any conflict in the sample program during Apollo it was between the scientific community and the engineers. The engineers were operating Apollo for example they wanted to do the missions faster than the scientists were ready to accommodate their studies. There were all sorts of problems associated with potential contamination of samples. There were a number of times in which the scientists and the engineers sort of locked horns. And of course the engineers were in charge. That was something the scientists were not totally comfortable with they were in charge. Through the program we, an accommodation and mutual respect I think grew between the engineers and the scientists. So at the end of the program one of the most thrilling things that I remember about that was, oh I don't think the samples are finally analyzed even now.

Most of the samples I think have been analyzed to some degree. We know what they are, we know what kind of material they are. But the beauty of returning samples from the moon or Mars or other places is that as time goes on experimental techniques get better you go back and you analyze samples again you learn more and more about them. And in fact we are still analyzing moon or rocks and learning about the moon. Now parachute Schmidt, talk to me about parachute Schmidt. What was so special about that parachute Schmidt? He was going to interview him later on with the program. Was he a hero to the geology community? If so tell me. No, we knew him too well for him to be a hero. But he was an icon for the scientific community. He was the first and only scientists selected to go on the Apollo missions and we were of course all there rooting for them during the time of the mission.

He also made while he was on the moon, he made discoveries that might have been missed by somebody who was not trained as a field geologist. So we always have thought that he did a great job and that we learned a lot more about the Apollo 17 site than we would have if he had not been able to go. Great. How was it just in general for a scientist to actually go to the moon? Well, it's really hard to answer that question. The other astronauts who were not scientists astronauts went through a great deal of training. They were taken out in the field many times and over a period of two or three years, several members of the scientific community tried to turn them into geologists.

And they did very well. I think though that there's probably a qualitative difference between how well a trained field geologist could do and a partly trained astronaut field geologist. Who is one of the best astronauts? Well, the Apollo 15 crew Dave Scott and Jim Irwin did very well. Of course, Jack and Gene Cernan did well also. And Charlie Duke and John Young did well also. The thing that you have to remember also about the Apollo missions was that particularly Apollo 11, 12 and 14 were very short missions. There really wasn't time to do geology on Apollo 11, 12 and 14. They were just there for a day or so and didn't have much capability.

Apollo 15 was carried out. We had the rover so they could go several kilometers from the landing site. They could see a lot more that was different. They picked up things that were different and important and made observations. Most of them, most of them published scientific papers, including the astronauts, published papers in the scientific literature following their missions. Do you remember? Just tell me a little bit about Harrison Schmidt. What does he like as a guy? Well, can I talk to you a little bit offline for a second? Tell me about Jackson.

Well, I've known Jack Schmidt since we were freshmen in college in 1953, so that's 35 years. And he has always been an outstanding geologist. His father was a geologist. He picked up on that and he was the one who convinced me to become a geologist. So we go back a long way together. Jack was always very focused. I mean, he knew what he wanted to do and he went out to do it. And it was not easy for him to be an astronaut. He suffered some personal difficulties and I think he actually had an operation at one time to make himself eligible for the astronaut corps. So he put everything that he had into it and trained hard. He learned to fly a jet plane. That's not something most geologists learn to do. And he went through. It must have been five or six years of intensive training to be able to carry out those three days on the moon.

So I have a lot of admiration for him, for his dedication, for his focus. He always was very critical. He was somebody who has high ideals and expects a lot out of people that work with him. And I think it was a splendid choice as an astronaut. What about Gene Schumacher? How important was Gene Schumacher's program? Well, Gene, in some ways, was the father of the Mooner Science program. In the early 60s, he had decided that he was going to go to the Moon shortly after President Kennedy made the speech. And Schumacher was out there applying. And he was unable to go. But what he did, instead, was he formed a branch of the Geological Survey called the Branch of Astrogeology. And he brought together in that organization a number of the people who eventually were major players in the program, including Jack Schmidt for a while, and people who have gone on to write books and people that you're interviewing for this show.

And what happened? He got disgruntled. How come? I don't know that he got disgruntled. I think, actually, after a while, the lunar program became a little tame to him. He went off and put his energies into the study of impacts, asteroids, comets, and was involved in many of the JPL robotic missions, the Voyager mission. He did. He's on records, having said, you know, press conference. NASA doesn't want to do good science. He wasn't having the site selection. Yeah, well, that may be, I don't know anything about that in detail.

Well, the engineers were afraid of a tragedy. There are some engineers that I think would say that they wanted the program to end after the first mission, the Apollo 11 mission, which they felt that had been accomplished safely. And they were still concerned that the Apollo program was quite risky. And so I think there was a lot of fear. And when you talk about selecting sites, for example, for missions, some of them are easy, some of them are hard, some have more dangers, some will be quite difficult. And I, for example, on Apollo 15, there were, there was this big reel, this canyon that the astronauts could have been lost in. I'll bet that there were lots and lots of discussions about whether they should try to land the spacecraft right near that, near that reel.

It was that kind of thing that was battered back and forth among the scientific community. And this scientist didn't get all of the places that they wanted to sample. In fact, there were missions that were canceled. Apollo 18, 19, 20, I think there were Apollo 22 at one time were planned. And there was a whole set of landing sites laid out. But I think all the scientific community agreed that it was just a splendid contribution. What were the rock fest? What happened with the first one? Well, the rock fest were scientific conferences. They gathered all of the investigators around the world who had been studying lunar samples to come together and discuss their results. The first one was about four months, I think, after the investigators had received their samples. So they had had just a short time to look at the samples. And they came together in various states of preparation.

I can remember one speaker who got up and as he took the podium, somebody was bringing him data to talk about. And so everybody was going in a really quick manner. But we learned important things at that first conference about the moon. We learned about the age of the marae, the volcanic rocks that fill the dark parts of the moon. We learned that the highlands of the moon, the light portions were made of a light colored rock called an orthocyte. We learned that impact really was the major phenomena that shapes the lunar surface. We learned that the lunar marae never had any water. The moon was completely dry. And of course, we learned that there's nothing living there as well.

All out of the first conference. We heard about all of that at the first conference. As I said, there were always conflicts between the engineers and the scientists over operational things during the program. And the engineers were definitely afraid of having a disaster on the moon. They did not want to have anything happen to the people that went to the moon. There were some people who believed that the Apollo program should have ended after Apollo 11 because it was simply too dangerous to do. Let me get that. Tell me about the engineer's spirit. Ready? All right. Now, we decided we'd keep the guidance system up because we were beginning to feel comfortable about our consumables. And then two hours around the moon, once we swung around it on the way back, we kind of fired the sand engine again to get us back to what we figured was the best trade off of using as much fuel as we could. Not doing anything crazy, keeping things stabilized to get us back to your recovery ship and the trip time that that would result in all that kind of traded off.

We had about three or four options developed and I'd about picked the one I thought we ought to do. Jerry Griffin was coming on duty about that time with his team and I went over all those with Jerry and he and I agreed what we thought was the right answer. And I tell you a story about the NASA management at the time that morning about the time we'd gone through all these options. The management gathered in, if we were in the third floor, they were down on the second floor in the viewing room. And we had a meeting where we went down and recap for them everything that had happened and what we were doing and what our return strategy was that is trip time and use of the propulsion systems. And then what our strategy was for maintaining the consumable margins all the way back to earth. We told them we didn't know whether the command was going to work or not when we got there, but excuse me, there was nothing we could do about that except to wait until it happened.

But the point I want to make is Jerry and I went into this management meeting with everybody and NASA up to and including the administrator in the deputy administrator George Lowe, Tom Payne was the administrator. We laid this all out and said here are the options, one, two, three. Here's the one we think we ought to do and here's why, et cetera, et cetera. And when we finished with that, there was just one discussion of could we get them back faster and we told them why we didn't think we could do that and why we thought this was the best option. The management said fine and then the only question that was asked of us was what is it that we can do to help you guys? What can we do to help you guys? Now here's, you know, top management of NASA having their whole agency riding on this flight and here we are 32 years old in this control center deciding how to do that. And the only thing to ask us is what can we do to help you guys? What can we do to help you guys? I must admit that it didn't really sink in on me at the time but later on and the more I've thought about it as I've gotten older, I mean I really got to respect people who can deal with delegation that way and not get in and muck it up because it's complicated and they knew they couldn't get in and muck it up.

But they were very, very supportive, very helpful and all in all it was I think Gene called it our finest hour or somebody did it. Let me ask you that. And I want you to tell me that. I mean in the final analysis for all of its tragedy or near tragedy, 13 really was an example of fabulous. I'm not talking about that. Chuck Berry is the one I remember. Let me see who else. Well in the early days it was Stan White. Stan White and Chuck Berry with the guys I remember from Mercury. What about Germany? I think we started to have a number of flight surgeons there.

Yeah, I remember getting zeal Schmidt, a couple other guys. Right before reentry, were there any remaining questions? Yeah, there were. Right before 13th. Your last question. It looked like we got them really close to getting home. Was there a tense moment at the end there? I thought you were worried about the heat shield and it hit the damage. That's kind of the end of that story. So you got 13 all the way back. What was your final question and was it a big one? Yeah, we had big questions about the health of the command module. Command module, of course, that little comb-like vehicle with small batteries that we were going to use to get the guys home and then of course later.