NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with John Young, astronaut and engineer who served as Commander of the Apollo 16 mission, part 1 of 2

You You Marla Marcus be okay John Young take one there You're the laptop, okay We'll start today and work backwards. Can tell us very role today at NASA? They've got me doing a lot of stuff that's associated with technical issues. I

Counted up the other day. I was working on 128 technical things and just little items and The way you do technical stuff here now you tell people about it and pretty soon you tell them often enough They think they thought of themselves. That's what you get done You're working on safety issues Well, some of them relate it to safety issues They're just better ways of doing things that make the space shuttle and space station more reliable and work better and I don't know if that's related to safety or not. It's probably more related to survival People told me and you we talked a bit about it last summer you keep up with lunar science What's going on right now the one thing? Maybe two that really interest you I think the lunar and planetary science conference next week will have a lot of things that are related to To what we're doing around here and and The thing that I think that's really exciting is the discovery by the prospector of water at poles in the Clementine also and

There's some other interesting things about the Moon that we've gotten from prospector that people don't think about much, but some of the magnetic fields associated with the moon Probably direct the solar wind in different ways and we thought about maybe and I think that'd be very interesting to go up or and see if it actually is the way it works Well, what would that tell us? Well, I'll tell you where you could find a lot of that implanted to hydrogen from the solar wind and helium 3 that Jack Smith lights in You know, and so it'll tell you a lot of things. I think going back to the moon Although it's only a very small place. It's a our sister satellite. I think we learn a great deal What's your take on the data and results from Clementine prospector is is there water? I don't know I think we ought to send a little rover up there and find out I sent it to the poles and I find out well a lot of people have talked about that We can do that and one of the faster better cheaper missions, and we sure ought to do it

I think that'd be great to find that out. Do you think if and when we go and we've talked to Alan Binder He's he's gonna go somewhere or another good for him Are we gonna find water? I hope we do. I hope we did There's a theory that Jack Smith says it's only hydrogen, but of course with all the hydrogen you could find enriched hydrogen and And there's plenty of oxygen in the rocks. You'd make your own water real quick Should we go back you bet you bet. I think it's absolutely essential that I think it'll be the greatest achievement of the next century when Human beings learn to live and work on other places in their solar system. I think that's gonna happen. I think I think I think the human species about ready to spread out Great answer. You answer my next question. What's the most important thing we can do there? Well just learn how to live and work on other places in a solar system

Explore and learn and I think we'll find out a great deal about the human Condition in the solar system and the human species and now we'll find out a lot about ourselves be a lot of fun Everybody I love lunar gravity one six gravity's great, and they love Mars gravity three eights peace cake really nice What about going back to moon as opposed to going to Mars? If you're really serious about long-term Habitation on the moon and Mars. I think you want to go back to the moon first and learn how to do all these things that are really difficult that we're working on right now in advanced projects We're working on Recycling air food waste water and growing crops in this and a closed loop environment. It's extremely difficult. I mean, you know See on the moon you can have a crop failure. It wouldn't do anything for you have a crop failure on Mars with that system You're all dead Because it's so far so so much time away the moon is two and a half days away from a can of beans Mars is 200 days away from a can of beans. See so we know we're going to make mistakes in these adventures and

People always make mistakes. You got to make mistakes you recover from then do any good to make the kind of kill you Not no fun better to make the mistakes on the moon. You think absolutely like I say two and a half days away from a Case of beans is the right place to start and I think we'll learn so much about working in the dust and working in vacuum pure vacuum that It just couldn't pass up the opportunity to do that and we'll make the kind of mistakes that you can get away with too. I hope You know those others are bad Great Mars the second sticks on top of it. Okay, go ahead Johnny Young take two Some people told me the moon movement went somewhat underground after Apollo ended 72 um Can you describe that time after Apollo and And your role in

Somebody keeping the moon alive I don't I don't think anything to do it. I just think When you go to places as weird as the moon was when I we got there and looked at it The idea of not going back is just it's unreasonable. You need to do that We need to learn how to human beings lean to learn how to live and work on other places in the solar system I think 25 years of solar exploration has told us how At risk this planet right here is from bad events the planet can take the bad events the people on them can't take them So we need to get out we need to spread out the species a little bit and we'll learn a lot too The moon never out of favor with me. I thought it was a great idea I can't imagine that we stopped but we did They just couldn't get enough money to do it and they couldn't get people interested in doing it with all other things going on like that You know the Vietnam War and all the other things that are happening but When George Bush was breathed and they had a synthesis group that said they could Go back to the moon on the Mars and they put in such a high price tag on it that nobody was interested

That was bad. There was a 91 did you think we'd be back on the moon by now? Oh, I always yeah, I always thought we'd been back on the moon Surely we'd have base up there 25 years after the first flight couldn't leave we don't Come believe we don't Um Should Apollo have continued after 17? I mean obviously there was a couple more rockets ready to go I think the big guys were ready to stop Apollo from The standpoint they didn't believe they were learning enough compared to the risks they were taking I think Even though I'm not The money You know the Saturn 5 rocket if we'd have Saturn 5 rocket today we put the whole space station in orbit one shot And of course that'd be the way to do it if you could Yeah, so do you mind just asking if there are plans for the Saturn 5 still around? Okay, yeah, for really uh, we're gonna dial back to the first hour for second um What happened to the plans for the Saturn 5?

What happened to plans for well could the Saturn 5 be reconstructed should it be? Is that is that at all possibility? I don't know that you would reconstruct the Saturn 5 you might reconstruct something like it There are plans available to build upgraded F1 engines at power the first stage of the Saturn 5. There's Uh, the tooling is available at the Marshal Space Flight Center and to build that 30 foot 31 foot diameter first stage tank Uh, I don't know if you do that or not But we so we haven't lost that technology. No, the technology's not lost There's a new upgraded stuff that you could put in here probably make it a lot better machine But it would take a lot of testing and a lot of work to do it It's done about your moon experiences um starting with 16. What was the highlight of your jay machine? I don't know that uh when you talk about the overall highlight was overall uh getting the whole mission done It was a very tough mission because uh when we got the moon we had to wait for three hours while everybody weighed the engine

We lost uh We solved in real time with us on the ground and uh and And the people all over the United States we solved about a hundred problems in real time It's kind of like what life is all about and so I was very pleased to be able to do it. I thought for a while we're gonna bore And turn around and come home without even laying on the surface. I've delighted when we got to To press on and do the work I remember I was struck by that when you said uh into a hundred operational errors What can you give me an example of some of them that you saw? I guess normal kind of things you're running to when you're doing something for the first time uh For example, I had you to pair pliers to get the cosmic ray experiment out of the case it was in to get back into the lunar module Uh, we knocked the fenders off the rover. We uh, I tripped over the heat flow experiment. I uh There's all kinds of things. Uh, they uh Driving some of the cores was very difficult

Uh, our uh on a lunar module our sband antenna didn't point at the earth. It was locked in place and and uh, so we had to do a lot of really uh real-time Innovative creative work doing lunar module chest and checkout. It was a lot of fun Yeah Challenge um You went to uh take hard and caley prepared to find volcanoes. Yes, I mean, that's what the geologists were telling you were gonna find What were your can you take us back there your first words Your first impressions on those EVAs. Yeah. Well, we didn't find any uh, volcanic rocks They I think they thought we was gonna find realitic type rocks where we'd done a lot of geology field tips, but we didn't Genetic three Um, you went to Descartes and caley prepared to find volcanoes at least that's what the geologists told you who we're gonna find Um, what were your first words your first impressions? You're on those EVAs about what you found and what you saw Well, we found different kinds of rocks up there. It was very unusual. They thought we're gonna find volcanic rocks and we found

Impact rocks breaches. It was made out of impacts and all all these rocks were squeezed together and put together in In a really tight thing and they're very old rocks The average age up there is 3.92 billion years old at the site and some of those rocks have ages Uh, 4.2 to 4.6 billion years old so they're very old rocks And they tell you a lot about the impact processes in the local region So I think it was important for us to find those rocks and of course the ground argued with us. We didn't know what we're doing and And we're looking at the wrong kind of rocks and You know you know almost convinced old fighter pilots that maybe they didn't know what kind of rocks they was looking at but I said I finally said why don't you take a look at them when you get them back in the lab The ground meaning the the back room you were you were going through a bunch of level to that yeah We're going through our capcoms to the back room and there's a lot of people back there that were

You know it was pretty it was a fun fun time So you were telling them uh, there's no volcanoes here, right? We're telling we couldn't find any basalt. We could not find any volcanic rocks at any kind and they were Consistent that we must be misinterpreting what we're seeing That's normal Well, we also found a magnetic field up there An ancient magnetic field and prospectors found a few more of those guys Around the surface of the moon. I think that's for exciting. What does that tell us? Well, I think it tells us said in old days the moon must have had a magnetic field a lot like Uh, maybe back in early times almost as big as earths So that I'll tell us something it kind of says where the moon Kind of helps you find where the moon must have come from and what kind of rocks it must have been made out of Could you paint a picture for for our viewers? To go along with some of the images that we have

Of what the site was like and it was the southernmost site and there's 8,000 higher Yeah, higher than tranquility and so on. I was at Roland site Roland Highlands and it had the impact rocks all over it And there was all kinds of rays produce but these rocks coming out of the crater south ray and north ray crater And one of the things we had to worry about was not knocking Not knocking axle off the rover driving through these rock piles and because that would really slow it down So it was it was a it was a pretty challenging problem And some of the slopes were pretty steep. We went up north ray crater Higher than 20 degrees because we bottomed out our pitch meter and broke it off Yeah So 20 degrees is about can you Oh 20 degrees slope is not too bad. That's not too bad of a slope to climb up but It was pretty exciting with us where no pressure suits when we got up and turn around and look back You know, look like we climb straight up. I was a little nervous about us going back You were you were about 1600 feet above the

Playing right here. I think the mountain is about 12 hundred feet high toll You know, you know, 304 meters You had a good view from up there Great view you can see all the way back to the little module you can see south ray crater In fact, we looked over south ray crater, which was a little Two-million-year-old impact crater that we found up there and and And found out that we could probably have driven right over to it One of the places they'd like for us to have gone, but we didn't get a chance What were your first thoughts when you when you Were you driving or you're walking up to house rock? I forget Well, we we had to park on the the hillside at north ray crater and walk over to house rock I guess it was a couple hundred yards We didn't realize a rock just kept getting bigger and bigger see the problem with the moon is there's no telephone Bulls up there so you can't tell how far things are away No telephone bulls up there yet, but we'll get some That's just real quick Sean. We're getting some feedback sound on the camera. Yeah, we're getting a little scrape

John y'all take four So how did Navy guy enough picking rocks up in the desert with lease over Let's very interesting question because Lee was a He was a geology professor at Caltech and Jack Smith and Lee got together and we were training We were backing up Apollo 13 to Jim Lovel and and That was the first field trip we really ever had we got down in In the sand gave real mountains and down across San Andreas fault there and In some other mountains down here and the Answer to the question was that the San Andreas fault has moved 140 miles and Very few main years Because some of the rock types that we found on one side of the fault were Down in So down by the salt and sea From up north to down south

So did that prepare you for sort of the jumble of rocks that you're in and Clues that you're gonna find on the moon No, but we had a lot of field trips to places like landslides and to Working in glacial till It's kind of like being on the moon because when you pick up a rock on the moon You really have no idea whether it's came from down the road or whether it came from the other side of the moon to get back on the earth and take a look Um Apollo 10 You got pretty close to the moon 47,000 feet Your impressions then Well that I think Apollo 10 we were Did some really interesting track in of the surface of the moon a moon is very It's an unusual place because all the craters are different So if you know the reels and the craters and you know and they're all different when you're flying over the moon It's not like flying around the earth. You know where you are all the time There was a few very young looking craters on the backside of the moon one almost king crater

It's a big 77 kilometer crater and it's got Uh All kinds of different colors and include the stark whites and dark blacks and various shades of browns and Man, it's something that's really weird I know in your press conference after 10 you were you were talking about triceccer Do you recall that? No, I don't remember that's too far back for me There was some nice there were some great craters on the backside. We had them uh and on Apollo 10 we'd named them all after uh All after places in the United States. We had one big crater back there. We called America another We called Florida and places like that and uh got a lot of trouble because they didn't turn out to be names at all They're all numbered when we went there. They're now named To the names uh to the name stick none of our names stuck no the international Astronomical bunch they say they do that They know some of them because it your uh

Is it your mission or one of the j-missions named them after the instructors? There's a head crater and yes it did yeah Um Were you ready to there was some some discussion of landing for 10 where were you ready to land? No, you couldn't land it with a 10-liter module It was overweight it didn't have gas in the assent stage and had a problem with the radar too and uh Wouldn't be able to land but if they give any of the light Uh the lightweight module that they gave to uh ended up the LM5 Uh, could you did you feel you could land With that I think they probably could have done it that hadn't practiced the surface operation So see those those were building block missions everybody worked very hard to do And we were working very long hours every day to do just to do the part of the mission that we had to learn We had to learn how to To uh transfer learning jack with the learning module go all the way to the moon Uh getting orbit with the linear module then the linear module check out and linear module rendezvous And that's a pretty big job and then so the 11 guys they just added on the surface operations and uh went on down and did it and

And then 12 guys landed on spot on the moon and so forth You know that's how it went they were building block missions everybody learned a great deal from the mission before Great And tell me what we've got All right Sean young take five Um Those early days before polo 10 went to know about the moment There's a lot of argument before everybody went to the moon where the moon was really Impacts or whether it was all volcanoes There was even some weird theories about it being big blobs of water that blocked out and made these circles up there And so we we learned a great deal when we went to the moon I think How did you find did we did you have good training in those theories or how did how do you get well? We were so busy training for polo 10 that we didn't get a lot of chance to do paleo

astral Geology from the air, but people like Jim head and Lee silver they'd come and brief us on what they thought and that was pretty good Um, you'd phone uh Gemini missions. What did you think of that first group of scientist astronauts in the Class 6566? I guess they came aboard Well, I just uh, I thought that was a good idea You know if we're gonna go to the moon we sure ought to have geologists Uh, in era and I didn't uh You know, we'd been training geology all along our first field trip with the to um 1964 we went in Grand Canyon and with some pretty famous guys from Yes geological survey hit so we got good training from the start But I always thought of geology person on the moon was the right thing to do. I'm glad Jack got to go Would you have wanted a geologist or uh, scientist on your mission? Well, I uh, I thought we had a lot of technical problems to worry about and it turned out we did

Like I say we had more than a hundred problems we had to solve in real time So I was glad Charlie was here because he really know those systems well Great um Back to Gemini um You were um, we're all okay good perfect place to roll out So we just uh got a couple Gemini and then we're done