NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with James W. Head III, Professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University, part 1 of 3

N N I How do you do that?

I went down for interview and much to my surprise. It was fantastic. You looked at this image. How do you think you waited the moon and back? That's exactly what we did. We had to do it all in a systems engineering mode and it was incredible. What was your first assignment? Your first day there and how did that pan out? The first day I got there, we went into a meeting and they said, OK, we got to do this, we got to do that. Jim, you want to prepare the view graphs? I said, Sure. What's a view graph? This is my first introduction. I learned plenty quickly, but my real first assignment was to plan sort of like which landing size we should go for, say, the 3rd, 5th, 7th Apollo missions because they needed testimony for Congress,

the following Tuesday and they said, we usually give people about a month to kind of like get their feet wet here, but we need this on Tuesday. So it's like total immersion and I had no clue. But needles to say, I worked over the weekend and put together some things and that was the way it went. You know, we had to stuff ready by Tuesday and it went to Congress and that was part of the testimony, like many other things that help to move things along. But it was a total adrenaline rush because I had no idea where these places were and I had three days to learn them. Now, how accurate were you? I mean, tell me the story of who put these sites together, these landing sites together and the fact that that's what they stayed that way. Well, it was interesting because the Lunar Orbiter missions, these were automated spacecraft that took images of different parts of the moon and there were a whole series of people who worked at the US Geological Survey and universities, et cetera, who were planning these things and they looked at the geology of the moon from telescopes, then tuned in with targets and then looked at the analysis of all this information. That was the genesis of the sites that we went to. Virtually all of them came from that.

And so it really was a scientific input after the early ones that landed on the flatmari and in fact, there were some very, very exciting sites. So the array of these things came from examination of the automated spacecraft images and you could see these things up close more or less and make plans for how you would go there with humans. Aren't you just a couple of young guys, though, who really ended up choosing these sites? Well, it was working for the Apollo program. It was my first job, so I was right at a grad school. This wasn't a postdoc, I just was right at a grad school. And most of the other people who were working with me and others there in that group were exactly the same way. It was tremendously exciting because we had no real experience in this, but nobody did, of course. So it was a great time because we were going to the moon. We had to figure out how to get there. It was a definite schedule. I remember on the second day I was there, they said, come on in, we have to talk about your retirement plan. Actually, we're going to the moon on Tuesday. Can I come back and talk about this later? So it was like incredible. Why the moon?

As a geologist, why was the moon exciting to you? Well, because I think it was a totally different dimension. I had grown up studying Earth Geology in my graduate career, et cetera. I looked at limestones in the Appalachian base and 400 million years ago. I mean, fossils and shallowering carbonate environments went to the Florida Keys and so on. And this was completely different. As opposed to very young things, the moon was really old. And it made me think about the fact that we didn't understand the first 80% of Earth history. Because most of what we think about is related to the biological evolution, which is only the past few percent of the total history. So it was like an alpha omega thing. You know, it's like, hey, that's the beginning. The moon is the beginning. And we don't know how we got to be where we are now. And the moon has the potential of unlocking those secrets. Didn't someone say to you, though, the reason we got to go to the moon is there's nothing else on Earth for us to find out to discover. Well, this is true. One of the pieces of background that I got in my graduate career was a professor here at Brown named Tim Much.

And he put together a seminar. He got interested in the exploration of the moon while we were graduate students and put together a seminar of three students, graduate students. And one day he looked up and looked at the window and paused and turned to us and said, you know, there are no real problems left in Earth's stratigraphy. We're just about ready to go out and get jobs. And here's our advisor saying, there's nothing to do. Important. And, you know, we were shocked. And what he really meant was that there were some important things, but the really big things were on the planets. And he was right. He was right. Look, I mean, my whole career for the last 30 years has been doing just that. And, you know, exploring the dimensions of these other planets and unlocking the historical context of them as well. But it was a shock at the time. We figured we'd been trained professionally and we didn't have a job. But, of course, we did. Why belt come? There's last in this series of opening questions. Why belt come? I mean, that's an interesting kind of thing. It's really fun to think about the fact that my first job in exploring a moon was working for the telephone company because it's so bizarre.

But really, it's so logical. Whenever the US and the past has had real technological challenges, for example, developing radar in World War II or other kinds of technology problems, they've turned to the Bell Laboratories, the laboratory arm of the telephone company, essentially. And so what NASA had done was said, we have this complex problem we have to solve and go into the moon and come back. And so they turned to Bell Labs who gave them a set of people who organized this laboratory, Bell Com, and then hired other people like myself. And that framework of systems engineering, which was like big news at a time, nobody understood what it meant, but it was exactly what you needed to get to the moon. That was the leading technology and technological thinking from Bell Labs. And we were actually a part of NASA, but also really Bell Labs. So it was a smart thing to do because you relied on people who understood technology but also had forward thinking and systems engineering, which was just a new way of thinking about things.

And that's, I think, a major contribution to getting to the moon successfully. Good. Bad news. Well, one of the key things was that when I came into the program, essentially, of course, the goal had been set forth by President Kennedy and really the goal was not the scientific exploration of the moon. The goal was to land a human on the surface of the moon and return that person or those people safely by the end of the decade. And so really, it was an engineering quest. And so the engineers clearly were in charge. No question about that. But as things evolved, of course, it became clear that if you're going there, you really want to figure out what to do. And not only that, we're going to go there several times. So we need to think about a strategy for the scientific exploration. And we want to leave experiments and perform experiments and so on. And so that began to emerge. But of course, the goal was to get the person there and return them safely, not to do a lot of things on the moon. And so that set up sort of a competition, if you will. The engineers want to do the simplest possible thing to achieve that goal to their credit.

And the scientists want to say, wait, we're going to be on the moon. Let's run over here. And that's going to be interesting over there. And how do we get to this? And why land in this dull, boring place? Look at the mountains. And you can imagine saying to an engineer, we don't want to land on a flat surface. We want to land on the side of a mountain. Whoa, get real. And so these are the kind of things you can just see totally, completely natural that there would be this really competitiveness about, you know, being sure that we did it safely versus pushing the envelope, if you will, to try to maximize the science. And so when I got in there, it was pretty competitive. And the key thing that needed to be done was to establish communications and have each group understand the goals and objectives of the other. Now, by 68, when you got in, it's a good, good time frame. You know, just hold a second. Check out. Yep. Well, in 1968, we didn't know a heck of a lot about the moon. There were questions about what the age of the surface was. The estimates vary wildly by billions of years.

There was, trying to understand, like, was it hot? You know, did it, in fact, have lava flows on a surface? Or was it cold throughout the history? These were major issues. And so it was a real challenge to try to understand where to go, because the issues were so fundamental. It was almost as if there was a school of thought that said, we just land there, pick up rocks, come back. We're going to learn so much. But the geologists, of course, didn't want to do that. They wanted to land in a place where they could see relationships and try to get at the sequence of events, okay? So tremendous lack of knowledge about what really was going on. And we began with each mission. The automated ones, as well as the human exploration ones, to increase our knowledge and ask more sophisticated questions as a function of time. Just as a quick aside on Apollo 11. When Apollo 11 came down, it was Kennedy's program. Nixon was now getting the credit. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Well, I think that everyone who was in the program had been motivated by President Kennedy. I think there's no question about that. The spirit of the country, the idea of being able to do this task,

camelot-like as it were. And I think that was still in everybody's mind. I mean, you know, the fact that President Nixon was then president, you know, he was the president. So, you know, he made the phone calls, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the sense of the exploration was really carried over from President Kennedy. What's their story about which carrier picked them up? I don't know anything about that. Okay. No, I don't. Actually. Tell me that story sometime. I thought you'd tell that story. It was Kennedy. Nixon wouldn't send it to us as Kennedy. Oh, is that right? Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. Okay. We're going to change roles anyway. How many feet you got there, Sean? Oh, she's sorry. I'm looking right at it, man. Probably not. Tell me a little bit about Farouk al-Baz. How important was Farouk al-Baz? What was your relationship with him? When I first came to Belcom, Farouk and I worked for Noel Henners together. And then he, months later, he became my first boss, you know, my second boss, actually.

And so, yeah. That's right. You can let him go and voice it for him. Did you ever stop and think, look what I'm doing here? Well, it was tremendously exciting to be involved in trying to figure out where to go in the moon and helping to choose the landing sites and working with the crews to plan where to go and talking to them about it. But I never had an out-of-body experience like, oh, wow. Look at this. It's because it was so incredibly exciting all the time that you never had time to think about it. You just did it, you know what I mean. And so every day it was something coming up. You know, if you weren't picking the landing site for the next thing contributing to that, you would be training the astronauts for this one or debriefing the one from before that. So, actually, never really thought about it in the sense of, this is fantastic. I could be flipping burgers or something like that because you didn't have time. What about the Rocco Patron and his group in Briefing Man? How into it?

I mean, Rocco Patron was an engineer. Right. What interest did he have in geology and in getting your help and you get your job done? Rocco was an amazing man. He was an engineer but completely dedicated to the success of the missions in its overall context, including the science. And I used to brief him on site selection and astronaut training. And I learned very quickly that the first thing I should do is put up a full moon view graph that showed all the landing sites to be selected, et cetera, and just the moon. Because Rocco would have been thinking about the moon between our talks. And he would say, oh, just a minute. I had a question about that crater over there. And I was facing, of course, he was sitting up front. I was facing the audience and all the engineers are going, oh, not again. And we'd go off on 45 minutes of talking about the science. And Rocco loved it. You know, he just sit there. There are people passing out in the back from hunger and so on. And we just really went at it. But it was that spirit that he shared with the rest of the people. So, you know, like everybody got into it. All the engineers did. And they were tremendously excited about what we were accomplishing, why we wanted to go there, and how we could do the job. Do you remember any heated debates in the early going before the engineers got turned on

about safety, about the mission specific, forget about this science? Well, a lot was needless to say, writing on these decisions. So, in the early periods of time, when you would choose a landing site, you would want to choose the smoothest, flattest area to maximize mission success. You wanted to get it as far away from any mountains or any edge of the mario, et cetera, as possible. And so, it became into sort of like a discussion about, you know, how you could get to the flattest place while we were trying to get to slightly more interesting places. And a lot of decisions were made. Like, no, we're not going to do that. It's not safe. We haven't done it yet before Apollo 11. We can't take the risk, et cetera. But I think everyone, this is part of the learning process. We got to know what the main concerns were. And we began to learn about what it was that was so important in this overall scheme of things. And then we could work together to try to move out into other areas. And that's ultimately what happened. What about Apollo 12? What about the controversy over that landing site? You've been to 11.

You got a couple of rocks. It was safe. What was the objective for Apollo 12? What's their disagreement about where to land? Well, there was always disagreement about where to land. And, you know, we had a site selection board process, which Rockup Atron shared. And there would be sites that were suggested right up to the last minute. And then a decision would be made. But Apollo 12 was an excellent site for a couple of reasons. One, it was on the western side of the moon. So it was with flat units, Maori deposits, that we knew were different ages. Because we had fewer craters on them. And they represented a different composition. So that was really important for us to learn. But the second most important thing was that it was dedicated to landing near the surveyor landing site. And the spacecraft that landed there a couple of years before. And we were targeted at the land next to that. This was brilliant. I think, you know, Bob Gilruth was probably the person who was most, I believe, dedicated to making sure this happened. Because the engineers knew that if they could pinpoint land next to that thing, they could go anywhere on the moon. And for us, that was like setting us free, of course. Because we could land in a little flat place between the mountains and so on.

So Apollo 12 was a success from the point of view of a separate type of Maori. But the pinpoint landing meant that we could confidently go to other parts of the moon that were scientifically incredibly interesting. Yeah, but yet Jean Schumacher, that was it. That was the straw that broke the camera's back for Jean. He was like, NASA's not feeling good science. Well, you know, there's a little bit of age difference here. I mean, Jean is the father of lunar science. And I think he had tremendous expectations for the moon. He wanted to go himself, of course, we all did. And he had planned incredibly complex missions with multiple things, which could have happened if the international situation had been right. But when I came into this, I couldn't believe it. It was like, we're going to the moon. They're going to let the astronauts out of the spacecraft. We can stay for a couple of hours. You see, that's a totally different vision than Jean's. Jean's was like, hey, we're only going to be able to stay a couple of hours. I'm sitting there going, my God, we can stay a couple of hours. And you know, that you see that all the time with age, okay?

So there's a progression there, I think, too, that, of course, my expectations weren't totally met because I was planning missions that never went to the moon in the final analysis, and they were cut back. So it's a sliding scale, and I think that's part of the issue. Great. Cut. Terrific. He's a Jean said, oh, 13. Probably more alive, probably more alive. Well, after Apollo 12, of course, the pinpoint landing had been demonstrated. And this is exactly what we wanted because we wanted to go to some of the more rough regions. And those that had complex geology, which would unlock a lot of secrets. And one of the most fundamental of those was a unit that had been mapped last century, and by Jean Schumacher, the Fromm-R formation, which was interpreted as ejecta from the embryo and basin. And since that big basin, back on the near side of the moon, was so large, it was a marker of geology. If it was covered, it meant that it was before this unit. If it was after, it meant that it had happened subsequently. And if we could understand and date that, it would be a tremendous time datum on the moon. And we could get absolute ages for for the rest of it. And understand how ejecta is in place in these big basin.

So it was a tremendously exciting goal for this. And we had to get to the rough terrain. The ejecta is not smooth. Okay. So were you disappointed because a 13 crew was very excited about geology. Hayes, level, they really went after it. Mitchell and Shepard, not so excited. Were you a little disappointed that 13 didn't make it? And what were your expectations for 14? Well, it's really tough to lose any of the Apollo missions, obviously, because each one of them was a major undertaking. And if we had been successful at 13, we could have gone on to another site. And gem level and the whole crew, Fred Hayes, the whole crew was really just tremendous in terms of their enthusiasm, et cetera. But it didn't happen, so that's the way it goes. And, you know, the goals were in fact absolutely accomplished by the 14 crew. No question. What did we learn? We learned the age of the Emberian basin, which was instrumental. We learned that the ejecta from the Emberian basin wasn't so much a blanket,

but came out and excavated local material. Now, this may sound trivial, but it's a very important concept from the point of view of how the rocks that are brought back by the rest of the Apollo astronauts can be interpreted in terms of basin events. So these are two fundamental things that we learned. What do you mean? Okay, so the most of the work that had been done on impact craters had been done, say, like meteor crater. And they're small kilometers, so on diameter. So the ejecta that comes out of those doesn't travel very far. It's low velocity. It comes out and drops around on the ground. Dealing with something like Emberian, the ejecta can go hundreds to thousands of kilometers. And in order to get to that point, its velocity is very high. So when it re-impacts, it excavates a lot of local material, which we hadn't thought about much. And so the 14 was the beginning of understanding of how that process worked. And it took a while, but we finally figured that out. And it's a major change in our thinking about ejecta deposits. And they are the fundamental unit on the moon.

That was great. I didn't know. That's the first time I've been... Yeah, the field trips, which involved taking the astronauts out to various sites that were generally applicable to energyology or specifically related to the sites were really fantastic. And, you know, the response to the astronauts was just as varied as the individuals in the astronaut core. Some of them were totally enthusiastic about this. Others say, hey, we can get out of town for a couple of days. Beats training in the simulator. Others initially couldn't be bothered. And that changed with time a lot. I think you have to think about these people as not a typical set of undergraduates who were going out on a geology field trip. I mean, here these people are incredibly highly motivated, but also very, you know, they're very competitive. So the last thing you're going to get good results from is taking them out and sticking their nose and trivial stuff as a group, because they're incredibly competitive, and they're just not going to like that kind of thing. So there was a little bit of give and take as the training progressed.

And I think that the goals were set. People were made to see how this was going to relate to their performance on the moon. And, you know, before not too long, these people became highly motivated students, because they could see that, hey, you know, you get out on the moon. We're not just going to pick up a couple of rocks. You're going to be on a moon for seven hours. And gosh, gee, whiz, that really looks neat. It goes about 30 seconds. And you've got to learn some geo-lingo, or you're going to look stupid. And the last thing an astronaut wants to do, of course, like any of us, is to look stupid. All right. All right. All right. All right. That's perfect. All right. Thank you. Thank you.