NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Dr. Gordon Swann, geologist with the US Geological Survey (USGS) and Principal Investigator of Lunar Geology for Apollo, part 3 of 4

Gene Schumacher was one of my heroes. He was one of my best friends and a mentor. I learned an awful lot from Gene. And as far as his importance to the program, he was crucial to it. If it hadn't been for Gene, I don't think we'd have had nearly the science on the moon that we did. And certainly not the geology. Gene was one of these guys that I think he could sell ice cubes to ask of us. He was a brilliant person. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a recipient of the National Science Medal from George Bush in Rose Garden. He was just a wonderful scientist and a wonderful person. And I don't think we'd have had near the science on the moon. If it hadn't been for him and his personality and his push, his doggy determination. But I can't say anything too good about Gene. When Gene first started thinking about the moon, that was back in the 40s even in the early 50s,

how was he regarded by his peer group? Doing geology on the moon? Well, I think the USGS is a very conservative hold outfit. And a lot of the old gray beards in the survey thought that's his young buck doing talking about doing geology on the moon when we can't even do all we need to do on earth. And he got some resistance and some ridicule. The USGS used to anyway have an annual thing at each of their centers called the pick and hammer where they roasted people. And Gene got pretty well roasted. And he had such a wonderful name for such things. There's a geologic term called super gene enrichment. And he was called like super gene moon shaker and genius moon raker. And in one of them, he was just called a cobbler because he was a shoemaker. So he got quite a bit of ribbing. And I think he loved it. He certainly loved the ribbing. But I think he liked going up against some of the old gray birds

and telling them what ought to be done. And he convinced a lot of them too. Well, can you explain after 12? He left. And he left angry. We talked to Carolyn about this yesterday. Why? Why was gene angry? Gene was somewhat angry. I think he was more disappointed. They just weren't doing as much geology on the moon as he thought that they ought to or science in general on the moon. I think he was unhappy with the congressional appropriations. NASA's program got way cut back from what they first envisioned where we would even maybe have large have a large lunar bases and roving laboratories and stuff. And all that got cut out very early in the program. Gene had devoted an awful lot of his energies to selling concepts for these later kinds of missions and all. And it all went down the drain just almost overnight. And I think he felt pretty let down and deflated it. A lot of how he had worked for was just suddenly gone. He got a little angry at parts of NASA that he didn't think were supporting and he got back into it and got in

the swing again. He said he didn't feel they were doing good science. He said, NASA's not doing good science. What do you think? Do you say that? And what do you mean? I think he thought I think gene taught that they were trying to turn astronauts into robots. And I think some people were gene wanted them to be able to wander around freely and have plenty of time to think and all and they didn't. It just didn't work that way. They were put under pretty strict timelines and schedules and we had to overplan the mission somewhat to make sure that there was plenty of time for geology that we got our share. So we did some overplanning. I think he thought there was too much planning for what they'd do when they got up there. He really wanted them to just kind of turn them loose and let them wander around and do their thing. NASA being kind of an engineering oriented type of thing. They wanted things to go click, click, click, click. If somebody was sitting on a rock scratching his head about something, he was wasting time. Of course it was

cost him a million dollars a minute or something for it to do that. So there wasn't really time for him to do that kind of thing. There were some kinds of equipment that gene wanted that were never developed for various reasons and he was disappointed. That's good to 11 and 12 for us. Are you doing a great job? How did 11 and how did Apollo 11 do geologically, do you think? I think he did very well considering they had no time to do geology. They probably just had so little time and they did a good job of time allotted to pick up a lot of rocks and take a lot. Quite a few photographs. I think they did a good job. They just had a few minutes. Well, when Aldrin first came down, he looked out and he didn't even misidentify some rocket. Oh, tell me that story. I have to think a minute. I think I think one of the rocks Aldrin looked at, it had some black shiny stuff in it. He said it. I think he really thought it was biotite, a common mineral

on earth called biotite. It wasn't. It was a much rarer mineral on earth called ilmenite. Biotite would have been significant in the biotite contains water. Nothing on the moon. As we brought back so far, she would any signs of water. It was not biotite. It was ilmenite. Why did the, a lot of geologists got upset when he said that? Well, most of them didn't. I don't think to put a bluntly those that think I don't believe. We taught them to not worry about making comparisons to say it looks like something okay that ilmenite can look a lot like biotite and it conjures up a picture and it conjured up a picture in our minds in the control center. He's looking at something that looks kind of like biotite and it turned out it wasn't biotite. It was ilmenite. So what? Great. You were the principal investigator on 11 to 13. No, I was on 14 and 15. Co, I'm sorry. Co. I was co-investigating. Let's just talk about 13 for a second. Fred

Hayes was great. Jim Lovell was interested. How disappointed were the geologists when with the target that they were going to, they didn't get there? Well, we were very disappointed. Of course, we were primarily concerned about crew safety, which we had nothing to do with. Man, we were very glad that they got back safely, but we were disappointed that the mission failed. As far as theology is concerned, 14 did exactly what we'd planned for 13, so we didn't really lose it. But well, we would have had one more mission to somewhere else on the moon if 13 had been successful. You don't feel the geologically level in Hayes. You would have done a more enthusiastic job than Shepherd and Mitchell. I don't think it had been more enthusiastic. I think that I think that Lovell had more training. I mean, Lovell and Hayes had more training probably than the 14 crew did, but I won't fault the 14 crew. I think they did a good job. How did the geology content change from 11 through 14 and then the J missions? Give me an overview of that. You mean the difference

in the landing sites? Yeah. How did the overall, did you, were you getting more geology, paint a picture of how? Oh, we were getting more geology with every successive mission. For several reasons, one is the state time increased with every mission. The mobility increased markedly when they got the rover on 15, 16, and 17. On 11, they had, I think, less than an hour, about an hour on the surface, a lot of which was spent deploying instruments. By 17, they had three, about seven hour EVAs, if I remember, with a rover that took them places, so the kind of, you know, it grew very markedly with each mission. Did the geology get better as well? Sure. Partly because they had more time to do it, but partly because there was more and more time for training and for site preparation. Now, you took the flight directors out on one particular field trip. Was that important to they get along? Oh, I think so, yeah. They wanted to go. It was their idea. We took the flight

directors. I'm trying to remember, we took several flight directors on missions. It's been, I'm training trips. We took Jerry Griffin out to Buil Park, I think it was, in Eastern Arizona. Jerry got pretty interested in geology, and I think that helped. The control center, therefore, was backing geology because the flight director was. We got a lot of support from Gene Krampz in the control center. There was another flight director on 14, and I can't remember his name. I didn't know him very well. No, it wasn't, and it was. Okay, that's all right. I can't think of that. I think we'll get this roll. 110, take three. Um, good. Well, Apollo 15 was, I think, overall, my favorite landing site. Maybe I'm a little bit prejudiced that way, but it had such a variety of things. It had , um, Mount Hadley, which is the highest point on the moon. It had Hadley Rill, which is the longest,

largest, sinews rail on the moon. It had both, um, mario material and lunar Highlands material is just a tremendous variety of things. Um, we thought that they might find an orthocyte in the Highlands because we'd found an orthocyte in the samples, so they were taught to look for an orthocyte, and they found some. Um, why was that a big deal? Well, an orthocyte is an important, very important building block in the development of a planet such as Earth, where you have a lot of volcanism. You have what's called a magmatic differentiation from melting stuff and then recombining it. And an orthocyte is one of the more primitive kinds of rocks that comes out of this, this process. Now, finding an orthocyte told us quite a bit about the thermal evolution and thermal history of the moon. So it was an important thing. We thought they'd find, because we'd found little bits out in the soils, but they found some good side, good side rocks

samples. Uh, we taught them to look across canyons and describe the opposite walls. We did that at the little Colorado River Gorge near Flagstaff. We did it at the, uh, the Tows Gorge in New Mexico because they were going to be on the edge of this big canyon called Hadley Rill. And they saw what almost certainly were actually... Take number one. Um, tell me about what you taught them to do in training. Well, one of the things we knew that they were going to see was a big feature on the moon called Hadley Rill, which is a sinuous rail, almost certainly on a lava channel. Over 100 miles long and about a thousand feet deep and a mile wide. And so we didn't expect them to go down in it, which they didn't, but we knew they could look across it. So they had a nice telephoto lens, 500 millimeter lens. And on at least two trips, we taught them how to practice describing what they saw on the opposite side of a canyon. One was the little Colorado River Gorge,

uh, near North of Flagstaff. And the other was the Tows Gorge, uh, near Tows, New Mexico, where they spent a fair amount of time describing what they saw and photographing what they saw on the opposite side. I only got to Hadley Rill. They looked across it and they saw what looked like layered bedrock basalts, which they described in some detail and photographed across the canyon with their, with their telephoto lens. And then they got into what we think was pretty much bedrock, somewhat jostled by impact on the near side of the rail and sampled what we think was really in place or nearly in place basalts. Probably about the only thing that was sampled on the moon, you could say was really essentially in place. It hadn't been thrown there by some impact. Did overall, did you think the 15 crew did a good job? Oh, very good. That's Danny. Okay. Um, now right about then, Nixon was really thinking about cutting the program. Yeah. Can you talk to me about, about, did Ed David convince him to keep going?

I don't know. I don't know if Ed David convinced him to keep going or not. Ed David, I had the opportunity to get a bit of cleanered with him. And he was a very strong supporter of the, of the lunar program and particularly the samples program. Ed and his wife Ann were pretty avid rock hounds, rock collectors. And she was more than he was, I think, as far as, but he was, he was quite interested in the whole program. And how much effect he had on Nixon, I have no idea. I'm not sure. Kind of second. Where the question comes? To roll 110. The 16 mission went to an area called the, the, the card area. And their primary function was to sample, I thought it was old lunar highlands called the Descartes formation. And to sample some highlands, uh, light plains material called the Kayley formation. The geologists that studied that area, uh, interpreted their first interpretation was with the Kayley formation was probably old Highlands volcanic. Their second choice, it was probably some kind of, uh, impact

deposit. It turned out it was not Highlands basalt or Highlands, uh, Highlands volcanic. It was the result of impact. There was some criticism that perhaps some people oversold the idea of the, of the Highlands, uh, volcanic. But the folks that had really studied it weren't really that sure that it was volcanic. That's what they wanted to find out. And it turned out it wasn't. So the first choice interpretation was wrong. Well, if, if, if, well, if we hadn't made any mistakes, maybe there'd been no reason to go to the moon. That mean we knew all the answers. Did young and duke do it a good job? Yes, very. Yeah. They were both very enthusiastic. They'd have quite a lot of good training. Let's move on to 17. But before we do, talk to me about Jack Schmidt. How important was Jack Schmidt to the program?

I think Jack Schmidt, uh, Jack was, was the geologist in the astronaut office or was a geophysicist. But Jack was the only geologist. Um, I think Jack did a good job of helping get other astronauts interested in geology. I think he did an excellent job, uh, getting them interested in geology. I think he did a good job on helping to sell, uh, training of astronauts and geology. Uh, I think he influenced some of the equipment that got aboard. Uh, I think he was a very positive influence. Uh, Jack is a very intelligent and well educated geologist with his bachelor's from Caltech and his PhD from Harvard. And he was a, uh, full-right scholar and I was very, very well trained. Now you tell me about your relationship with Jack. You guys were together. You, you were with him when he found out about, uh, getting selected. How was, what was that about? Tell me, have you been friends for a while before you came in astronaut? Yes. Uh, Jack was hired by the branch of Astrogeology in 1965, I believe. Uh, about the time,

same time that I came to Flagstaff from Denver to work in Astrogeology. So Jack and I started out working together on the same kind of projects, uh, trying to figure out what astronauts should do on the moon, how to do them. And it kind of thing. So Jack and I were working very closely together when he applied and then, um, in fact, he and I shared an apartment for a while and I was in the apartment tonight. He got the phone call that's saying that he was selected as, uh, as an astronaut. So, uh, what was that moment like? Well, I was very happy for him and he was, he was pretty excited about it. And then of course, we were very excited when he got sent to the moon when he found out he was going to get a mission. They did some juggling around of crews and Jack would normally have gone on Apollo 18, which had been canceled. But being a scientist astronaut, decided they would better send the one scientist that don't geologist they had to the moon. So he got to go. Tell me the story about how people in Flagstaff felt about Jack going to the moon.

I like to say that we were all very excited that Jack, uh, was going to go to the moon. We were just tickled to death about it and then we found out it was going to be a round trip and Jack is a guy with a very good sense of humor and he kids a lot so he gets quite a bit of it too. Okay, um, on 17, um, what were the highlights of 17 as far as you were concerned? As we did with 15, 17, uh, Apollo 17 went to the, uh, Valley of Taurus Littro, uh, which was interpreted as possibly being very young volcanic or relatively young. Well, they're a little younger than other volcanic on the moon, but that we've, that have been sampled, but it's still pre-old. Um, everybody got very excited about the orange soil, of course, Jack found and it was some interesting stuff. Well, it was, uh, expertly sampled, by the way, by Jack. Jack's descriptions and John were just probably a little bit better than anybody else's, but they should have been. He was

a PhD geologist. He was a very enthusiastic guy when he got up there. In fact, the medic started worrying that his heart rate was getting too high. He was, he was so excited about it, but, uh, what was it like in the back room for you guys? For you geologists in the back room to have one of your own up there. Describe that to me. Oh, everyone was tickled to death. He, uh, we laughed at him quite a bit. He had done it. Do something. There was a, there was a, a, a little crater that's become known as ballet crater on the moon. It's a little crater, all a couple meters in diameter and kind of shallow and Jack went to take a sample near it and he took a couple pictures of the rock with the crater in it and then he went for the rock and he went, lost these balance. And he started spinning around and he fell on his back. He bounced up, went round and round and back and forth. And we were all laugh and then he was all on television. It was wonderful. When he finally got his balance and got stopped, there wasn't any sign of that crater. He had completely demolished it so it's now known as ballet crater.

How essential was it to have a good geologist on the moon, do you think? I think it was, uh, I think it helped. The other guys did such good jobs that I can't say the Jack set the program forward by great strides by going to the moon. But I think he did a better job geologically than any of the others but he should have. The others did remarkably well. Were you impressed with Gene Surnin? Yes. Come here. Yes. I thought Gene really fell into the role of Jack's field assisted. Although Gene was commander of the mission and a military person and all that. As soon as he got out and started looking for rocks, he became Jack's assistant and follow Jack and help Jack and all. I think some people with military training might not be willing to give up the authority and want to be the boss all along. Gene did not do this. He worked very well with Jack.

They were a good team. Just take me back to the moment that they found that orange soil, okay? I need that as a story. What was going on? What happened? What was the reaction? Well, they were on their way back from the second EVA and they were going to make a quick stop of a crater called Shorty Crater and they got near it and Jack looked over and said it was orange and Gene looked and confirmed it and it went over and he dug a trench in it and they put a cord tube drive tube down in it and sampled it both laterally with their trench and vertically with the car and ran out of time. They took photographs. There was a calibrated color scale in the view of the photograph and yes the soil was orange and the stuff they brought back was orange. It was a little orange volcanic tiny little spheres of glass in the soil and they are actually a fairly bright orange color. What was exciting about it at the moment though? Why all the

excitement? Partly because it's about the first color anyone saw in the movie. Everything on the moon's gray except for an occasional individual mineral here and there but all on here's something that's got some color on the moon and it did have. Let me just see what we're at for you. And he supported training of his troops very well and we were pretty well funded to do the training and the biggest limitation was that the astronauts didn't have a lot of time and their

primary thing in life was to fly a safe spacecraft and science was second to that and I understand that of course that's second to the safety and the good conduct of the mission. It can change roles. That's great. You're doing terrific. Actual outcrops in the walls of the of the rail on the far side which was about a mile away from them. They took some good telephoto pictures of them described it in quite a bit of detail and it's probably the best evidence of real bedrock that we've got on the moon from a from a from a Apollo mission. It was brought into the program and I think that played in the in the final acceptance of selecting scientists as astronauts. Okay. Switch Max. Very good.