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

So the hitting back to the lunar module, they're supposed to be in there in just a few minutes so that they get power down, et cetera, because they're running out of consumables. And Dave looks over and he sees this rock full of holes sitting over in the side. So he slams on the brakes and says, Houston, got to stop and adjust my seatbelt. Oh, that's okay. We don't want you falling out of the rover. So Dave gets out of the rover and goes over, collects this rock, brings it back, puts it in, gets on, says, you know, I think we're okay now, you know, to stop to fasten your seatbelt is an okay thing, to stop to pick up a rocket at this point is not, okay? Safety is the most important thing at this point. So that's a really good example of how like a human, you know, I mean, like really understood exactly what was going on there and really knew that he needed to get that rock and did the job.

And of course, that's a beauty of the astronauts too because, you know, they weren't just like sitting there going to like follow instructions totally, like to the letter, they were explorers and they got these kinds of rocks and they turned out to be incredibly important. That's a great story. 18, 19. Well, the handle is a group. When it got canceled, what was going through your mind? Well, again, when you're involved in this thing, it is so intense on a day-to-day basis that you just have to keep working. So really the effect of the thing being terminated towards the end while incredibly important because we really had an integrated scientific job to do, you know, I didn't go off and cry or anything like that because we're going to the moon tomorrow, you know, so you kind of had to continue on with the next couple of missions, absolutely for sure. So it was disappointing though because, you know, we were really learning to optimize. We were learning, for example, on 1920 and 21, we were going to use a more sophisticated rover.

At the end of the astronauts' exploration, they would outfit it and then set it off on a traverse automated to go to the next landing site. And it would pick up rocks on the way and make observations across a thousand kilometers till it got to the next landing site would be there with those rocks when the next crew got to the surface. There were all kinds of things that would be done, you know, with these future missions if, you know, they were permitted to go. And I have to say personally, every time I go to the Johnson Space Center and see that Saturn V line on its side, I have to say that is really disappointing. The idea that we built a couple of those things and now they're lying on their side for tourists. I mean, it's great for people to see the size of these things, but I think everyone would agree it would have been better to send humans to the moon with it for yet another mission. Geologically, I'll ask you what we gained, but first let me ask you what we lost by not continue. Did we leave a lot on the table, as they say, in poker? Well, it's very difficult to answer a question like that in the sense of what we didn't learn by not going.

There's no question we had a complete menu of selections of other landing sites, which had very significant scientific questions. For example, going to Tyco, which was the southern crater in the Highlands, was highly debated towards the end of the mission sequence. That was a great site, that was a difficult site, but people were starting to warm up to that. So we would have gone to places like different places. Jack Schmidt wanted to go to the far side. We actually spent a lot of time thinking about how you would land in Sio-Koski on the far side of the moon, and we would have done that, and that would have been very, very important. There's lots of fundamental things that we didn't learn because the missions were terminated. But again, this wasn't being done solely on a basis of the science, so I'm disappointed, but at the same time, it's a dynamic associated with political will, with cost, and lots of other things. Should we go back to the moon? Should we go back to the moon? Absolutely.

Don't you want to go? I mean, what's the question? We have a tremendous amount to learn. We have the capability to do it. It's a total inspiration for young people. I think if you ask anybody on a street, if they could go and get back safely, wouldn't they want to go? You know, only people that had tickets for a dual concert to Saturday would probably say, maybe let's wait a little bit, but, I mean, come on, you know, who wouldn't go? Cut. That's great. All right. I mean, really, I mean, are you talking scientifically or? Yeah. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, I could answer that one too. I'm sorry, I got it. Yeah, in terms of going back to the moon scientifically, I mean, one of the reasons we didn't for quite a while after that was because we really were victims of our own success in the sense that we landed on the surface and walked around on the surface.

And I think the human perception commonly is that if you visited a place like that, you've done the job. It's not that there are interesting things, but when you say, should we go to Mars or Jupiter or the moon again, you know, we walked on the moon. So what's the question? So in a way, of course, what we did was we learned a lot about a few places, which was incredibly important for our understanding of the moon and the moon's a cornerstone for our understanding of the rest of the planets because of that. But what it also says is we have a major investment in the moon in the sense that we have all this information. And if we get different kinds of data from different types of missions, we could integrate it together to a fuller understanding for just a small pitance more than we've already made an investment in. Of course, that was hard to sell because we went for, God knows, 20 some years before we went back to the moon and with automated spacecraft. And, you know, it's silly because the trouble was people thought, well, we've done the job. And in fact, we hadn't. What about Clementine and how important, how valuable is that information? Oh, absolutely.

Both Clementine and Lunar Prospector are pretty much the kinds of things we wanted to do immediately after the Apollo missions when we knew we weren't going back with humans. Because what they do is they give you an integrated view of the geology and remote sensing, sort of like the mineralogy and composition of the globe as a whole so you can take the individual Apollo landing sites and Luna's Russian sample return sites and fit them in this context and it's real synergistic. Absolutely. You can extrapolate that to the rest of the moon and really understand what's going on. That's what we're doing right now. We're in the middle of this exciting period now. It's like a resurgence in lunar science because of all this new information. What did Apollo mean to you to the country? I think it meant as a, you know, being my first job, it was incredibly exciting to be involved in something like this. And you know, you always hear many of the people in Apollo and large space endeavors saying, well, it's not me personally, it's a team effort.

If you haven't been involved in it, I'm sure it sounds pretty trite. But I would say the one thing I carried away from Apollo was the fact that when humans work together, they can achieve unbelievable goals. And for me, that gave me a sense of vision and hope, you know, for humanity because it's very clear you can do that. You can really do that. There are people who have complex backgrounds and, you know, what could be immense rivalries. And yet I've never seen an environment in which these rivalries were minimized so much. If somebody got up on a meeting and even hinted that there might be a personal disagreement between one person or another, it was just unbelievable. It was just silence and people, you know, it's like, we're going to the moon. I mean, we don't have time for this crap. And it just, that was implicit, not explicit. Nobody ever said that, but the feeling was there. It wasn't tyrannical. It was exciting. It minimized human competition, et cetera, and maximized working towards the goal. It was amazing. And I'm convinced we can do that in many, many different endeavors and we should work towards that.

Okay. Cut. Yeah. I'm doing another show for another that you want to tell you about it. Come to Belcom. The history of Belcom, how does it mirror your participation and our participation in Apollo? Well, I think Belcom was a systems engineering organization. And obviously the system was incredibly more complex than just what you did on the surface of the moon. Launch vehicles, launch windows, surface operations, a whole series of things that required a lot of people to think about these issues. And geology was just sort of what happened towards the end before you had to get back. And so as the Apollo program evolved, more and more people started leaving Belcom because they were essentially, we didn't know this word at the time, but downsizing because that part of the mission had been shown to be a success, the plans for engineering, the systems engineering had been accomplished and we were well on our way. So for us, who really were at the end of the whole thing, I remember on Apollo 16 and so on coming back to my office and I had to move my office every time because Belcom was like shrinking throughout this and we were clueless.

We just were doing our job, but the whole thing was telescoping around us in terms of the number of people working in the Apollo program and ultimately, Belcom was merged back with Bell Labs and a lot of people went back there. And I went on to Brown University to begin working really on the analysis of the data. It's interesting because I've heard the engineers in mission control describe those years as divorces, alcoholism, et cetera, but it didn't matter because all you were doing was flying those missions and it was the most exciting time of their lives. I mean, young men, how exciting the time was it for you, Jim? Well, it was tremendously exciting. I mean, I think I'd never been on an airplane till I was 27 years old and like a couple of years later, I'd been all over the planet, I mean, with this sort of thing. And so just opening my eyes to things I'd never even thought about before, let alone thinking about going to the planets and actually being involved in some of the missions, you know, it just was a total adrenaline rush, you know, constantly, again, if you weren't working

on selecting the participation and selection of the landing site for the next mission, you were debriefing the crew that had just come back and oh, by the way, this afternoon, we got to worry about, you know, where we're going for the next one and analyze the rock from the one two periods before because we have to tell the next crew what those rocks tell us about what they should look for. It was just nonstop and incredibly exhilarating because you are involved with a whole host of people from tremendously different scientific disciplines, physics, astronomy, geology, and so on and engineers. I mean, I didn't even know what my father was an engineer, but I didn't even know what it was all about. .