NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Leon "Lee" Silver, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, and Gordon Swann at Sunset Crater, part 2 of 2

I think they very quickly taught me that was Jack and every one of the crews I worked with, that they are interested in being able to have some direct measure of their accomplishments. Every day we had a specific assignment that Jack mentioned this a moment ago. They could see what they had to do and they found that they could do it. And after enough of those experiences, they began to believe that this was a useful training experiment. But there are also elements of luck. And Jack doesn't even remember them. Jack and I and the 13 crew were in the Oracopias and we were coming down a big dry wash and I was right behind Jim Lovell just listening to him and having him tell me what he was seeing.

And these rocks were sticking out of the wall of the wash about like this high or a little higher up this high. And I spotted a peculiar spherical form on one of those rocks and I thought, sound, I think this. Well let's see what Jim does. Do you remember what that was? It was a complete, pilot pot. And Jim was so delighted to find that pot, you understand. And I didn't put it there, it was just one of those strokes of luck. And I remember the first time I visited Jim's home, he took me to his study and showed me that pot. It was a big deal in his life. You know that's the second time the training business that that happened. I found one of me, your crater on the first training trip I ever went. Is that? Jim Chumaker ended up with it. Oh silver tongue devil that he is. Oh, that he was. Yeah. Did you think in the beginning, this goes to early on in my show that the moon was geologically interesting where you want to go?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It wasn't it. It was an is and we just barely skimmed the information that's important. And understanding the solar system from the moon and we'll have to go back and do some orbit. We'll do that when we're technically a little easier at it. But the things we've learned have just been enormously valuable to all of our modeling. These early training trips benefited from being relatively simplistic compared to what they later become. So in later times we had all of the radio gear and we had a back room set up in a carry all somewhere so that we really were simulating the missions. But in the early one, the benefit was that they were simple to start with. There were one on one pretty much. And we had the advantage of having one of the outstanding field geologists and teachers beginning to work with these crews within the constraints that I and the others tried to provide of what the pilots expected their training to be like. And we worked within that system and it worked beautifully.

I don't, I would be hard. You can't measure it because you could never do two experiments. And you have to realize that there were complex feedback loops. Jack was educating me about what he had to do as an astronaut. As soon as a commander came into the scene, the commander started telling me what they had to do. And to remember what I had to do to respect what they had to do and that was not ego or anything else. It was the reality of the time demands on them, the reality of the integration of all kinds of experiments that they were responsible for. I was being educated. They were, Jack was being educated, all the guys who worked in astrogeology with Gordon right there were educating me, you understand. It was a mutual bootstrap kind of progress towards a better operation, a better operation. And every once in a while, a commander would get a little bit cross about the fact that I remember Dave Scott showing me at one time.

He doesn't remember it, but he did. Well you see, one thing that Dick Gordon taught me when I was back up crew on Apollo 15, he said it once and I'll remember it forever, you know, these kinds of activities, time is relentless. And geologists aren't, that isn't unknown to geologists, but often, generally, there are situations where time is clearly relentless when you're dealing with geology. But in space, it's always relentless. There's always a fixed amount of time to get a job done and you have to be prepared and trained to work within that and maximize the return. And that's what we were doing. Great. I'm going to ask you about that. Oh, it's actually a rare piece of sound footage. You in love and you are saying time, time, they need more time, you're getting very excited. Very excited. Very excited. I guess I did. You did. Do you remember that instance? Tell me about that. No, I don't want to go right into that moment in the movie when you tell me about this. What happened then? What was going on? The concern we had is when we analyzed the geology along the proposed traverses, we thought that surely could possibly be a volcanic feature.

And as we listened to the crews as they scuffed the soil and recognized that there was something orange here and something orange there and what have you, the question came up. Were we seeing the effect of oxidation on the salts? Because the colors were not very far off from that, at least from what you described and what we did. Well, and also the television we had at the time was very good and it did show the color. It did show the color. So, unfortunately, we don't have those videotapes. This would have been, this is our last mission. We have never, we had never sampled a volcanic center from which we might have gaseous emissions which would have perhaps oxidized or altered the basalts, but now in retrospect, we should never expected oxidation in there. So we didn't know what we had, but the time issue was really strong. The time issue was important, but the important thing was this was different than anything we'd seen to that point in time.

And I kept saying to Bill Mulver, who was the head of the team at the time, I said, Bill, they've got to take a course sample. They've got to take a course sample. Well, how do you guys, we're way ahead of us. Meanwhile, you were taking a course sample. Meanwhile, the only con person in the solar system was me. He was taking a course sample. I was a little bit excited too. But we did immediately get into a routine of a half trance, so-called training. All the training we had done just in the bear. In 30 minutes, we had a complete suite of samples. We could have improved on it. No question about it. But we had enough information, including a 70 centimeter core, that has, since I think, made that one of the more outstanding samples of the moon, it turns out it's going to be increasingly critical as we try to understand not only the deep interior of the moon where it appears to have come from, but also if we really put our hearts and minds to figure out how the moon formed, it's going to be an important player.

Was the level given you a hard time about the team? No, level was a gem. The one of the best things that happened in the whole latter part of the Apollo program was to put level into the science back room. Nobody was going to be screaming my views versus their views, level, calm the thing down. And you could talk to love. Most of us knew level well. I left to know that he would do a considered analysis of what we were requesting and do the right thing. Now, that science back room is something that I don't know whether you have a discuss with Lee, but that began way back in the, probably even before we started the systematic training of the crews, because Jean Cran's got in. That first scuff, Warren Saw, I think you may remember that I hesitated before I called

you, but I said wait a minute, and the reason was that up at station 3, I had seen a reflection off the rover. I almost sampled it, and it was orange. Oh God. And so I said wait, I want to be sure, it's not, where's the rover? I think I said that. Where's the rover? And so I, looking back over my shoulder, just trying to see where the rover was, so I didn't sample another reflection. But that, that was an exciting 30 minutes, that was the best we had. Well, there was a lot of serendipity in that whole thing. There's your command module pilot starting to see orange stuff every year.

Yeah, as soon as he heard the word orange, he was, he was seeing it every, it was all over. I bet he had seen it, but didn't want to say it because he could be, yeah, he's right somebody like Buzz Aldrin in the Micah, you know, unfortunately criticized for saying something looked like Micah, and it did. It did. It was, it was, the cleavage, the cleavage was, well, it was flashing, it was flashing. You know, when you, when you, when you, when you've been out and you've seen Micah and the Royals and things like that, flashing in the sun, and that's what the, the glass in the regolith looks like when the sun's on. But the, you know, I really, it's interesting, you're describing the kinds of things we thought we might see. Nobody really believed shorty was a volcanic crater, but it might be. And when he got there, and we saw that, then, you know, everybody's mind started to agi-rate, but we really did get fresh volcanic material with volivals attached to it, and even though that's not why it was there, yeah, at that point, okay, and 17 orange soil. I think Jane thought I was crazy, and I first said, but, uh, but quite a second later,

he saw it too. He did. He could see it from where he was. He was over to them, to my right, and he could see some of the spots inside the crater. And that was what you can see on the photographs, which are very effective. That was probably that whole 30-minute period of getting that set up, and knowing it was something that really was worth doing was the most exciting 30 minutes of, at least that part of my fuel season. I had no idea what was going on in the back room other than, I think I may have said, we're going to have to have some more time here or something like that. I think in the same time, you guys were saying that in the back room, and, uh, but we didn't wait for, uh, much to, uh, many instructions we just went to work. Well, in retrospect, Jack, we didn't know what we were doing. And, uh, nevertheless, the fact was it was different. It was so different that we had to spend some time finding out what it was, why it was.

It's probably one of the classic examples of why you put human beings in that kind of situation. A robotic system would have had a very difficult time coming to grips with that, uh, particular if it sawed at all. And it was pretty subtle color in the regals. You realize that orange soil had been gardened. Of course it is. And there was, what, three or four or five centimeters of, of, of regolith developed over it. If he was not fully. Had been so heavy, Jack, so that you scuffed deep enough. It's not being heavy. It's being clumsy. Oh, yeah, perfect. Great. Three-hated. Uh, Baldwin wrote a book called, on the face of the moon. Yeah.

I'm most serious scientist and geologist said, the moon is nothing to study in the moon. Well, as a young geologist, would you have agreed with that? Tell me that back again. Well, I'll admit that I was geocentric. I mean, I was centered on the earth. But the fact is that study of the moon and when Baldwin wrote his book was largely in the hands of planetary astronomers. That's because not many people grasped the implications of the Viking rockets and all potential for getting us to the moon. So Baldwin was, in fact, far ahead of his time, as far as I'm concerned. But one guy who was not very far behind him was shoemaker. And shoemaker really got the thinking about going the moon. It was in 47, 48 that I met shoemaker for the first time. And he was working on the Colorado Plateau.

He was looking at these volcanic features. He had looked at meteor crater, which was then known as coon-boot butte. And he began to think seriously about getting to the moon. On the other hand, three years after Baldwin's book, I was working on meteorites. And the people who were working on meteorites, we're asking the questions, do meteorites come from the moon? Are they samples of the planets, other planets, or are they just out there in a special belt somewhere in space? So with our ability to use modern analytical techniques, which came on largely as a result of the technological evolution associated with World War II, everybody was looking at things that came from farther and farther out. But I have to give Baldwin all the credit for that stuff. Great, true. OK. Can I stay with one less?

If we were going to go to the moon, did you see the value of training the people going geologically and tell that back to me? Give me the whole thing back. Well, I certainly felt that if we went to the moon, it was an unparalleled opportunity to learn something about other bodies and training the astronauts in my mind was the natural thing to do. Because I've always been a firm believer that the ability of the human eye, the human mind, the human body to accommodate and adjust is particularly unique. We talked about the accident of scuffling up some orange soil. That orange soil was, in fact, a total confirmation of the importance of setting a man to the moon. Because two men did the right things. No, as Jack said, no automated system could have done it as well as they did.

The flexibility, the versatility, the thinking aspect of man can't be matched by any robot, so we have it this time. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. All right. We got speed. Well, it was a little better, but when we finished the training for Apollo 17, we ended up out here. Yeah, I remember that. Every time all the astronauts had come for one of those things, the geologists and flags to have an old head for Houston. It's in control center. So you guys were out here, you and me. I was down in Houston. Well, this was a great place to finish up because we had an exposure to some volcanic activity. And that's what we ended up finding on the second excursion.

And you know, that rover you guys put together for training was really a great, great machine. Now, that works real well. How do you do that? You know, there's quite a contrast between that last trip. Training trip we had out here, Gordon, and the way you and I started out in the Hopi buttes with just not knowing anything about what we were doing. Particularly, for example, like sampling. I mean, that sampling to a geologist was pretty normal. But when you start thinking of it in the context of working on the moon, it takes on a whole different aspect. What's that you got there, Gordon? This looks like a Xenoleth. It's a piece of Kaibab limestone. It was caught up in the volcanic, and it came up through the limestone formation and broke off pieces and brought it up with it. On the reason we can tell what this is, Xenoleth is because it has a coating of basalt on it.

But it is a limestone. When you train the astronauts, Gordon, what was your intention to make them geologists? Yeah, to... The main thing is to make them good sharp geologic observers. But we learned to make them as much geologists as we could. In his case, we had a little bit to start with. Mighty little. I think... As the training progressed, we learned a lot. We learned that these fellows were... the test pilots in particular were excellent observers. They could synthesize information very quickly. The one thing that we may have made a mistake on early on was trying to put too much vocabulary into the training. And so we began to simplify that. We depended on the fact that they all had a good engineering education. Most of them probably understood chemistry very well. And so we depended more on the basic vocabulary of science rather than the specialized vocabulary of geology.

But they all ended up... Most of them ended up being excellent field geologists. They adapted to that kind of environment very quickly. And I think a lot of it had to do with the way the training progressed over time. Where are we now? Cold. This is the San Francisco volcanic field. It's an area of several hundred cinder cones and then a major strata volcano called the San Francisco Peaks, right in the middle of it. We're out in an area covered with cinders erupted from sunset crater about a thousand years ago. The area here is called cinder lake. Or it looks like a lake made full of cinders. Why was it important? Why did you choose this area? Because well, by the time the 17 crew flew, we knew that there were a lot of basalts on the moon and they were very similar rocks to these rocks here. These basalts.

What did you tell me a story once about when Jack got the ticket to the moon, how you all felt about that? Did you tell me that again? Oh, that one. We were all so tickled that Jack got a ticket to the moon and then we found out it was around the trip. I always had a lot of friends. So we were kidding. We wanted him back because we wanted to take his brains about what he saw. Yeah, these guys always sign us. They want to get all the information they can out of you. Then they throw you away. Was this a valuable area for you, Jack, out here? I turned out to be quite valuable. The experience that I had both as a geologist for the US Geological Survey here in Flagstaff, learning about the volcanic field, and then during the training, because we ended up being the only mission that really had a chance to go into what was called dark-mattled area and everyone suspected, and indeed correctly, that these dark-mattling deposits on the moon were centers.

We're the kind of thing that were thrown out of volcanoes. And we were even more fortunate, because in the discovery of the orange soil, which was underlaid by black soil, not unlike this, we indeed found some very fresh pristine volcanic material. It wasn't young. It just been protected for three and a half billion years. But still, it turned out to be recognizable as that. Why was that important? Well, we had pretty well by the time of Apollo 17 flew. We had a pretty good first-order understanding of the evolution of the moon. We didn't know a lot about the late history of the moon, and that we thought we would find with these dark-mattled deposits. That prevailing wisdom was that these were certainly relegably young and possibly young in age. Well, it turned out we were wrong on the latter point that they were not young in age. It erupted just after the marble salts had erupted. Speed?

It's been almost 30 years since you scuffed up that orange soil. Was that significant? What did it mean? What do we know about that? The orange soil has become increasingly significant, not only because it formed very deep within the moon and gave us our first real recognizable sample of the deep interior of the moon, but because of the volatile materials that are associated with it. These turn out to be what we call undifferentiated or primordial materials. That is, they take us right back to the beginning of the solar system. And that's some information that we never expected to get. And indeed, it begins to constrain our limit very much our models for the origin of the moon and indeed, to some degree, the origin of the earth. Okay. I haven't walked away yet. Okay. Do I want to start on the rock? Why don't you guys pick up the rock and then just walk away into the sunset, okay?

Do you want to guess, Cory? We will, you go ahead and talk about it. I get the rock. Yeah, it's your rock. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead. Well, you've taken another sample, Gordon. Yes, we'll take it with us. Now, that early time out on the Hopi buttes was really something that I'll always remember. Yeah, but I still think we got to get insights because the kind you think you're going to have to put up with. Well, you know, the first thing we found out is you can't interrupt anybody on a communication system or be without them getting sort of unhappy about it. And that didn't happen very much in the lunar missions but it did happen a couple of times. Particularly when everybody got excited. I remember Dave. You get them all going away? Well, Jack did, too. Yeah. Yeah, but when they first went away, I was over Ballet Crater. I was going to a little upset with somebody named Bob Parker.

All right. All right. All right. I'm trying. I'm trying. All right.