NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Edgar Dean "Ed" Mitchell, NASA astronaut who was Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 14, part 2 of 3

But probably the reason Alan had got a bad rep in the scientific community was he told him very upfront and frankly, I don't want to waste my time. I'm not that interested in science, I'll do it, we'll do a good job, but let's get it done quickly. Let's be efficient and don't waste my time. What was the object of the geologic objective of your mission? You'd describe it to me from our own comb crater, give me what you were after and why that was important. Our objective was from the region from our own, which had a comb crater in it. And it was a very modest sized crater, but it was deep and the idea is of course that a meteor drills a hole in the surface of the crater, throws the eject out in the flap like this, and by sampling along the edges of the, or the ray from the crater, you can get material that goes clear to the bottom of the crater.

And that was our objective was to find out what was down several hundred meters into the core of the earth by picking up samples along the surface, as well as getting surface samples and setting up our other electronic devices and solar wind sensors and seismometers in the whole panoply of scientific experiments. But the comb crater in particular is because of the ability to get samples from deep inside the moon by having them lay on the surface after being overturned by a meteor. What might it tell you? Well, the geologists want that stratigraphy and that's what it is. The layers of the surface, or the layers under the surface, because that gives you all sorts of formation data, morphology, how did it develop, when did it cool, what were the various layers of volcanic, if there were layers of volcanic, what does it look like

with age, generally when you go down to the surface, you go back, down from the surface, you go back in time. So you get a history of the moon doing that. Now what made this landing site different than 11 and 12? The difference between Apollo 13, I mean 13 and 14 from Arrow, which is the site in 11 and 12, was that we were the first to go into the Highlands area, or the Rug and Plateau area, as opposed to 11 and 12 landed on the Maurei, the filled in craters that were filled in by volcanic flows and then chopped up by meteor impacts. This was the beginning of getting into mountainous regions and we were modestly mountainous regions of Plateau with pretty good size hills and rails around it. Did that make it a more treacherous site to land? It made it a bit more treacherous because the surface was so uneven and we had to find the proper site to land, not everyone had to find the proper site to land locally.

But the terrain was much more rugged going into it higher and undulating. Now following the 13 problems, the disaster of almost losing the crew and everything that followed, how important was it to you, how important was it to shepherd to get it right? Do you feel that pressure? We felt the pressure of having to succeed, but I think both of us were very successful in putting that aside. We were going to do our best to succeed anyhow and it was not an overt pressure of, hey, you guys have got to do it. It was, we knew we had to do it and we wanted to do it and I believe with nearly all the crews, what is most uppermost in everyone's mind is I don't want my part to fail. I don't want to screw up and cause the mission not to succeed and so every man on every crew was bound to determine to do their very best so they wouldn't be the stomach block

and certainly it was that case on our crew. After you took off, you had two problems, let's talk about them one at a time. First problem you encountered, you're on your way out, everything's going fine, what happens? The docking problem was the first problem that we encountered and that was the inability to pick up the lunar module out of the stack, we turn around and hook onto it like a switch engine and pull it out of the Saturn 4B, I mean the Saturn, the four stage of the S4. When it didn't latch and stew was flying at that point and we tried repeatedly several times to come in and hook and the capture latches just wouldn't work. I think to this day no one was quite sure why the most likely reason is that perhaps in the thunderstorm that passed over just before launch, we got a little moisture in them,

they froze and they were just stiff. And so eventually after backing off and thinking about it with Houston, we came up with an alternative procedure of firing the final locking device with stew driving it in there and that worked. So we didn't do it in a two-stage step, we went right on in and fired the bolts and it worked. Were you guys getting nervous at all about whether or not they didn't kind of work? We were concerned, we were definitely one of the successful mission and that we couldn't do this, couldn't get the lunar module out. There was no way we could go out of the moon and make a landing. The problem was that if we couldn't figure out why the docking mechanism didn't work, then Houston would be terribly suspicious of it about us coming back off the lunar surface and trying to dock at that point. So fortunately after we got it docked and brought the probe inside and examined it carefully, so there was nothing wrong with it.

So more than likely it was just a little water that had frozen and mined them stiff and difficult to operate. The second problem, landing radar locking up on infinity. I've got a good story that Al told me about that. I'm interested in your version of that. And what happened there? Well the landing radar problem was due to the earlier abort circuit problem when we changed the computer language and we set the logic within the computer and failed to realize that it had not reset the landing radar circuitry. And so that had to be consciously set by cycling the switch or cycling the circuit breaker, which we didn't realize until we were down past 20,000 feet and the landing radar had not activated. Which left us only about 90 seconds as I recall before we were at a board point.

And I knew what was happening, but I didn't know which of these two fixes we should try first until Fred Hayes called it up from the ground and Houston made the call to recycle the circuit breaker and it immediately worked, immediately the radar came in and then locked on. Now when you got to the surface, there was some discussion though about Al and whether he was going to keep flying the thing or not and if the thing didn't recycle or come back up, he was pretty determined to get to the surface. What was it you said to him when you got down? Well that's a nice story, it really didn't happen that way. The actual circumstance was that we were in manual mode for a board because of the abort switch problem and it was a moot point because we would have had to manually pitch

over and look at the lunar surface regardless of what we did. So whether we would have continued or not to continue would only have been after a manual pitch over and a direct observation of the surface. So it was actually not, it was a non-issue. It sounds like a great story, but I'll have to say it was a non-issue. So you didn't get to the bottom and say how, what would you have done? No because I knew what we were going to do already. We were going to pitch over and take a look at it and if we weren't in position, we'd have had to abort. If we weren't in position, there wouldn't be any question. We'd land it. Great. Okay. Cut for a second. We're getting camera sounds here. Okay. Well the question of how would we navigate or how didn't we navigate once we pitched over and saw the lunar surface.

Remember we had flown this profile in simulators hundreds of times, hundreds of times. And we had indices on the windows that we could see at each stage where the various landmarks were. And I was monitoring the instruments to tell height and velocity and so forth. So when we pitched over and were right on target, cone-created was right where it's supposed to be and the picture out house window for the triplet and dominant craters were just where they were supposed to be. Only fine adjustments were needed, very just a few blips on the control system to move us right where we were planning to go. It was then a matter of looking out and finding a smooth spot to get where there wasn't a crater or a motor or something under our landing gear when we touched down. Well you guys were notorious for like, and you scared the hell out of the flight controllers because they always said if you leave it up to the pilots, they're going to land this thing no matter what.

Do you think if you pitched over and it looked a little dicey, you guys still want to try to find a place to get there? Well I think if we had pitched over and we hadn't been quite where we thought we were, yeah we still tried to find it if we could recognize we were in the general area, I'm sure. The main concern was not where we're going to be in the general area. The main concern was the altitude, would we be too high or too low due to this rough terrain. That's what the landing radar was for. To give us a sense of height, correct the computer for the actual terrain. Describe your outset package. What kind of experiments were you going to do other than the geologic concrete or exploration? Well, the scientific experiments in the outset package caught me with a short memory in a long time ago. But we had a solar wind experiment. We had a two seismograph experiment, one called the thumper, which was a device that had several charges in it that could be selectively exploded and drove a plate into the ground

to create a small seismic wave, had 20-some shots in it as a matter of fact. When I laid out a system in geophones and would move along the stations in far one of these charges, and some of them didn't work, but most of them didn't, and with some reburations it could be picked up by this series of geophones. We also had a mortar experiment that was to be fired again for seismic purposes after we left the surface, that experiment never was fired. Then we had a whole series of particle experiments that were set up in their various instruments set up and tied to the telemetry station that were to get solar flux of different particles. There were several of those that I can't remember exactly what they were all called after almost 30 years here.

Did you feel like you were overloaded with stuff when it came to all these science experiments? We really overloaded ourselves in that we made sure we had a workload that probably represented a hundred and twenty percent of what was normal. Just in case an experiment failed or a piece of equipment failed and we had to throw it away, make sure we had plenty to do. On the other hand, if nothing failed then we all pressed ourselves to try to do the entire timeline. That happened to most crews. They really worked themselves very, very hard. More than was reasonable in order to accomplish virtually all the objectives as did we. We really didn't have any equipment that totally failed. We had a number of pieces of equipment that were very hard to utilize to get out like this whole outset package you were talking about. It was very hard to get down and see the bones that unlocked the thing so we could take

it apart and assemble it. Interesting, just an interesting little side die because there's really no reflected light on them. There's no atmosphere to reflect light and to cause light to get into shadows in places. It's all either black or white. Shadows are very sharp. So we couldn't see down into the recesses where these bolts were and that was of course a great frustration. We were both trying to look and trying to get this thing set up and it took everything took longer than we ever expected it to. Just because of the dunes, because of the combsiness and cumbersomeness and the pressure suit, the tools were the first time they'd ever been used. They weren't the same as our practice tools of course. Every piece of equipment had never been really exercised before. All of that newness just sets you up for nagging little difficult problems where things didn't work like they should be.

Remember, we went into space with brand new craft that had never been flown before in space. Never really been exercised in that environment, even though we didn't test after test after test. It was still a totally new environment for us and the equipment. Excellent. Terrific. I wanted to ask you about that and summation, was working on the moon, did it come as a shock to you about how difficult it was? Just as a general, you've given me good specifics, but in a general way. No I think working on the moon was in general easier because of the freedom that you found with zero gravity, I mean one, six gravity, with the reduced gravity. However, there were frustrations, the frustrations of the stiffness of the suit, the frustrations. Well, it was a little difficult to maintain your balance at times, leaned over too far and you'd be like a turtle falling on your back.

So those were minor things that we knew were going to happen, but nevertheless until you do it, you never quite know. So even though I thought it was in general easier, nevertheless the compressed timeline, the fact that we were under the gun that really nothing could go wrong and we maintain a timeline, and things went wrong, one right after another, just nagging little things, just moving around and making sure you didn't step on cables on the ground that you'd strung out or kick over a piece of equipment or something like that. And the modular equipment transported a little mat, it was fragile in that one six gravity. It was very easy to bump it too hard and you're afraid it was going to turn over or just inadvertently hit a piece of equipment and watch it go spinning off out of its holder and then trying to get ways to reach down and pick it up again and maintain your balance.

Those were the nagging little problems that slowed us down. But they weren't unexpected, they were just something you had to experience. Well speaking of any problem, let's talk about the cone crater. Was the trip to cone crater more than you guys had bargained for? No, the trip to cone crater wasn't more than we bargained for. What was the problem with that trip? Was our inability to macro-navigate? We went further on foot than any crew had gone at that time. And the geologists, because it was a beginning of a scientific mission, they wanted precise navigation. They wanted to know where we were taking our samples. They wanted to know where we were doing the experiments. They wanted to know where we were putting geophones or any other piece of equipment on the surface. And it turned out that our three-dimensional photograph maps just weren't good enough. Those sand dunes are the craters, rings of craters, like sand dunes.

One sand dun looks about like another. And trying to find our landmarks that might be buried beneath the rim of a crater or the valley of a sand dunes, it was very, very difficult. And sometimes you'd get right up on one, you'd think you had it, but you couldn't see it in context of the larger landmarks. So we were terribly, terribly frustrated by not being able to really micro-navigate. Now when I say that, I don't mean we were off by 100 yards. We were trying to be off by less than 10 yards or 15 yards at most, even 5 yards, no more. That was very, very difficult. And our frustration, while our trying to do that properly, it causes to lose a lot of time. So it put us way behind on getting up the top of the crater, and as you know, from just the boy's transcript, I thought we were considerably further to the north than we were. He kept wanting to go around the crater in a particular direction west toward the rim

of the crater. That was pretty certain. It was further to the north. We had to go more straight up, and it turns out that was correct. But that didn't delay us. An awful lot. There was just a little disagreement between us as to where we were in our navigation. Did you think you'd actually found it at one point, and were disappointed to find out that you hadn't? Well, we thought we, you know, we thought we would probably top the next rise, and sure enough, we'd be able to see it. It turns out we were there, but we couldn't see it. And when we finally got to the point where Houston said you're out of time, you've got to stop, we were right where we were supposed to be, within feet where we were supposed to be, yet we could not see the rim itself. Only in retrospect, only when they had done the triangulation after we came back and plotted all of our photographs, did it make us realize we were between 50 and 80 feet from the rim

of the crater, and it was downhill toward the crater from where we were. We were virtually there and could not tell it just from visual observation. In retrospect, it was frustrating, but it was also relieving because at the moment we thought we'd missed it completely, somehow we had messed up terribly. And it turned out we hadn't really messed up terribly. The only thing is the undulations of these crater rims made them look like sand dunes that you couldn't see over. And sure enough, the cone crater rim was right there, we just couldn't see it. A few feet. We just walked a few feet in the direction we planned to walk, there it was. Something good did come out of it though, didn't Alice buy a rock or something? Tell me about that. Well, we found what was called white rock. And in fact, as it led even closer, led us to our closest point to the rim of the crater. And we made a big deal out of that, the colors in that one, the interest of the geologist.

So we sampled it and brought back good samples from that site. Tell me a little bit about finding that white rock. What happened there? I mean, what was interesting to you and what did it tell us? Well, I can't remember now what it finally told us, but we were looking for changes in the stratigraphy, changes in the type of minerals that were there, the type of breaches, the type of anything that looked different than just as volcanic, gray, brown, granular, volcanic material. And here is a chunk of startlingly white rock and then inclusion in a very large, much larger boater. And of course, we mentioned that the geologist got all excited. So we went over and sampled it, of course, with our normal sampling procedure. In terms of getting lost, did you know?

Okay, you're out.