James Burke The other side of the moon 1979

the other side of the Moon was here in Studio seven attempting in Studio seven attempting to describe the most historic event in my lifetime and perhaps yours Neil Armstrong had just landed on the moon but have not yet made his one small step in spite of what had seemed a flawless landing the tension here was difficult to describe and if you saw our program earlier tonight on BBC one you'll know that over in Houston the flight controllers were just recovering from one of the most hair-raising experiences they'd ever had none of us in the news media knew how close that landing had come to disaster because we had not been told it would not have been good for NASA for the facts to be made immediately public in the 10 years since the world thrilled to these acts have apparently flawless daring much has come to light about how flawless the enterprise was none of it detracts from the tremendous courage of the men who flew these missions but it puts their efforts in a slightly different perspective it is now clear for instance that the machines were at all times not perfectly built and on one occasion fatally so that the idea of going to the moon in the first place was not Kennedy's and that at all times the Apollo missions were in political jeopardy depending on the incumbent president's priorities that throughout NASA had to fight to survive at all and that this the systematic scientific exploration of the Moon by geologically trained astronauts happened late in the program almost as an afterthought and almost not at all I have always felt that Apollo was a great adventure story but not until now have I been able to appreciate in detail the other side of it here is that story when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he came in peace for all mankind or so it said on the plaque in NASA however you think America what did Apollo 11 mean to you personally Paulo 11 to me was an opportunity to that's yeah okay let me that's because I always think team it's it's when they say personally I find it real difficult to okay I got it all right what did Apollo 11 mean to you personally 11 to me was red white and blue the Americans like was that straightforward been in the military for a long period of time I believe in my country and I was glad to be in a posture personally give the United States the political social economic impact of the actual lunar landing the decision to go to the moon was effectively made here in this car park behind the executive building in Washington on May the 6th 1961 by two men James Webb the boss of NASA and his associate administrator Bob seaman's is he 24 days before American self-esteem had been shaken to the core by Yuri Gagarin's first flight and then a few days later eroded even more by the Bay of Pigs fiasco the day that ended Lyndon Johnson the vice president said to Kennedy what we need is for you to write me a memo asking me how we can beat the Soviets in space one day later this memo turned up it said is there any way we can beat them in space how much will it cost are we working 24 hours a day on it and should we build bigger boosters to do bigger things well by the end of April LBJ had talked to enough people to realize that the only way to achieve a major propaganda victory was to go for the moon and so in the first four or five days of May he had intensive meetings with businessmen people from industry the media to find out if it could be done and what the public reaction would be at the last of those meetings he asked Webb if Webb thought that NASA could manage it by the end of the decade and Webb said that he would need one more day to go back and consult with his experts but as he and Siemens were walking back to their car in this car park Webb turned to Siemens and said I think we can do it what do you think Siemens nodded and that was it 19 days later Kennedy went public on the 25th of May 1961 in a State of the Union address to Congress finally if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all as did the Sputnik in 1957 the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish you'll notice the reasons Kennedy gave the fight against communism the need to impress the wavering outside world that the American Way was the right way there was also the fact that with the Korean War gone the heavily defense oriented economy was stagnant and Apollo would provide jobs and money for industry Kennedy made no mention whatsoever of science apart from a few interested researchers the scientific community at large was against manned space flight and anyway there were no votes in science and yet the u.s. space effort had begun with science when back in 55 Eisenhower had promised to get the Navy to try and launch a small scientific satellite sometime in the future it also began logically enough with weaponry and trying to build intercontinental ballistic missiles this time by the Army in fact relevant rounds army rockets the Jupiter could have put America first to displace by a year when it launched in September 1956 it never reached orbit because Eisenhower was so anti space race he made them fill the Rockets final stage not with fuel but with sand in 1957 Sputnik proved him wrong there was a race and the Russians were winning it America panicked find out what they're doing that we're not doing which is do something about a very quickly a secret report told Eisenhower that the Russians now obviously had Rockets big enough for nuclear attack but he considered the facts too gloomy for the public while privately increasing missile expenditure publicly he played Sputnik down they'd have put one small ball in the air after they'd done that trick a second time Eisenhower gave Vanguard top priority and in December 1957 the Navy were ready to retrieve America's reputation unfortunately their rocket wasn't you put us on out into this general Medeiros von Browns boss on the army project thumped the table America he said must go all out to beat Russia a country that had only one aim in mind will be that has as its ultimate goal a man domination of space and if we don't were gonna be in trouble Pike partly conceded in January 1958 von Braun's rocket put their first satellite up in March Vanguard finally flew now space was becoming a powerful policy instrument Eisenhower decided to take it out of military hands in July he signed the space act setting up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA a civilian agency to run the manned space program insult was added to injury when the army team was moved lock stock and rocket to the new agency including of course their genial leader von Braun and confident and eventually space exploration will so stimulate the imagination of the American people that they will be willing to give this challenging cast the necessary financial support I feel confident that we will see spaceflight in our time within a year and a half George Lowe was heading a secret NASA committee planning a moon trip before anybody even left the ground and still no science I don't think that we in NASA in our initial planning had anything but a vague idea that we'll also do some science but certainly there was not any major scientific effort early on in the planning for Apollo in 1961 Jack Kennedy became president and 4-space nothing changed worsening relations with Khrushchev over Russian intervention in Laos left Kennedy far more concerned about the threat of communism worldwide than about shooting men into space moreover he was deeply worried about the commitment he'd inherited to support a strike against the new Castro regime in Cuba throughout the first few months of his presidency the temperature of the Cold War went to freezing and it was left to Vice President Johnson to keep NASA's morale from sagging through lack of presidential interest which in the light of events to come was just as well NASA was on the verge of its first manned flight when on April the second Russia did it again to America's chagrin 23 days before they're delayed mercury launch was due Yuri Gagarin went into space first a week later the cia-backed invasion of Cuba failed disastrously at the Bay of Pigs an American Hero was desperately needed and when Alan Shepard briefly took on the role in a suborbital flight Lyndon Johnson knew he'd backed the right horse when he saw how the flight had affected the American man in the street Shepards success clinched Apollo's future they were now clearly votes in space I was riding down the street toward the Capitol with a vice president in an open car and he looked at the thousands of thousands of people that lined the streets and in reviewing this parade and he mentioned a couple times he said it really is a tremendous public response to this particular flight he also said Shepard now that you're going to be famous you have to remember a couple of things he said he said never pass up the opportunity for a free lunch or to go to the men's room which I have never done since pass up the opportunity aimsweb close friend of Johnson's extremely successful businessman and new NASA boss wasn't entirely happy at the unqualified commitment Kennedy then came up with on May the 25th to land a man on the moon within a decade well I had no reservations about the engineering capability to do it on some timescale but I did feel that the sort of uproar that was created by your Garren's light would not translate into long sustained support for a very complicated and difficult project as a matter of fact I wrote a letter to the vice president that time saying that I was perfectly prepared to go forward with this but that he should recognize that if we didn't have the continuing support of himself and the president that we'd be lost we'd be like two foxes running in front of two packs of hounds Congress in the press and we'd be pulled out which one was the one man who fixed Congress because when Kennedy gave his speech it was passed almost on the knock this was John and Lyndon Johnson really oh yes I you have no idea how much him how people didn't want to disagree with Lyndon Johnson and then he knew everybody on the hill and he knew about everybody on Hill and he who were all about he's were buried Kennedy had effectively set the nation in a race in which by their own definition alone they were already well behind and so a colossal amount had to be done very quickly finding the right sites for the various administrative centers like Houston which was marshland at the time and all the political infighting that would involve and then finding the right kind of people with the right kind of expertise to do the job a team that within five years would add up to more than 400,000 and above all Apollo was going to cost a much nobody new estimates varied from seven billion dollars to a hundred billion but the one thing they did know was where it was going to go because it was NASA's proud boast that of every budget dollar ninety cents would go to private industry and interestingly enough Kennedy had specifically said when you go out looking for contractors to build your machines don't just go to the people who are right technically be aware of the wider ramifications of who give the money to so we looked at a contractor's proposal we looked at how he would do the job we looked at how he would have done something in the past we looked at his management structure and of course we looked at costs also but by no means that we always go for the low bidder his husband as we hadn't been accused of at some time as it happens they did with the plum contract for the mother spacecraft worth 400 million dollars going to North American Aviation the fact that they'd built and flown the x-15 rocket plane had put the astronauts on their side but North American have not come out top in the preliminary evaluations and Apollo's bound to stretch engineering abilities to the absolute limit even the head of their space division at the time Harrison storms who pushed for the contract in spite of internal opposition felt that they were out on a limb but once you get people inspired to do something they'll sometimes play ball games way over their head and I think we played is at least up to the capability and probably above the capabilities of the division at that time the technical demands on the lunar module contractors Grumman were to provide as many headaches though not as you'll see to quite such a horrifying extent but NASA expected some problems when a contractor runs into difficulty he naturally thinks that he can solve it we had to follow closely enough the developing difficulties that we knew what they were knew what caused them could send in task forces into the contractors plant to work with the contractor to solve them if they were not able to do it that to bring the equipment out of the contractors plant to our own laboratories for testing and evaluation so we in a sense developed this pattern that wasn't to say you've got a contract in you deliver or else you've got to be penalized for naturally we said the first thing to do when you run into difficulties is to find out what caused it fix it and then begin to assess the financial and other implications of this was a reversal of the process followed in many areas of government service by the early 60s to Americanize it was hard not to see a space race with the political and financial stakes escalating odds in 62 before the one man Mercury flights were over the Russians had taken the advantage and the limelight again in August of that year they flew two spacecraft up to the first rendezvous in space was in the headlines and the fact that it shared the front page by the milestone of the Cold War like the Cuban Missile Crisis only served to underline a potential value of each space success in propaganda terms on the uncommitted nations space had become fully politicized when Kennedy was killed in Dallas the dream did not die with him mainly because the dream and the ambition had been largely LBJ's all along so now space had a presidential champion but American plans to take over the lead with a Gemini two-man spacecraft we once again preempted by the Russians going one man better five months earlier in October 64 but through 65 and 66 Germany flew virtually unopposed trying out in Earth orbit the necessary steps to go to the moon a journey which even as they rehearsed it brilliantly was being jeopardized by events beneath them in Vietnam the last Germany splashed down in November 66 the Pacific Ocean and triumph it was only three months until the first Apollo flight the new rocket had been successfully test flown and at Cape Kennedy the first Apollo crew were ready Apollo one was to be flown by three of the press man's favorite astronauts and was to be a trial run of all the systems in Earth orbit Roger Chaffee was new to space and white first American space Walker and Gus Grissom commander and veteran of the mercury days in spite of a demanding schedule they found time to be photographed in the command module simulator showing off their new highly complex control panel the real spacecraft was already on the launch pad and on January the 27th they were on board for a test countdown when something more important to NASA than the moon landing happened Friday afternoon laid around 6:30 at night in January the dark out of the Cape and uh we had had a difficult time with our difficult in terms of getting things to her but not on the spacecraft we'd had blue my most work problems were communications on the ground at the title there was a technical problem of a three wire to our system for communication purposes compatibility with a spacecraft another common was making if we can't talk to each other here on the ground how we can talk to each other from the moon that that the tests had been delayed but we were very close to our scheduled with the plugs out test you're going to disconnect the umbilical cord sort of isolate the spacecraft electrically and they're not disconnected physically from the rock in any way and at the moment part ready to pick off we've been in a hole for not going to remember the reason now I heard this voice I really don't recall the word but I had a monitor right in front of me and I was able to see a flash of light and there was a three television views I was looking at one looking right into the hatch of the command module the one next to it was on a second floor right below the command module and I heard this voices as a problem I could see a light and on the second floor I could see some things swinging there were wires and what happened this took place over about 19 seconds from the first flash till the time the spacecraft in effect bursts and let pressure out and what I was seeing on the second monitor right next to the first was some swinging of wires and things we were of course we're totally unaware of what was going on at that we knew as a serious problem we had people right around the spacecraft they were very nearby because they were part of the test crew to disconnect plugs and do certain things once the smoke start coming out of the spacecraft to crew our ground crew now trying to get to the door because at this test within that we were going to be running an evacuation test of the spacecraft the final part of that test at night was to check these procedures the ground crew had to work to get the boos protective cover off and the outer hatch and of the inner hatch run over a place for a couple of minutes and when the hatch was open you could see just a void and it was dark and pad leader reported to me that he could see no one in there and what had happened of course is the fire which is that had really reached the pressure point in nineteen seconds and burst the bottom part of the spacecraft had blackened everything in there and we tried to get the medics up there and things but there really wasn't anything we could do it was over so fast The Voice tape of those 19 seconds has never been released and after the bodies had been removed one reporter and one cameraman were permitted to record the scene the spacecraft was taken away for the post-mortem to begin and George low the spacecraft program manager set up an investigation team headed by astronaut Frank Borman to find answers they found them and they were appalling because of fears that an air atmosphere inside the spacecraft would give the crew the bends on the way up and to save weight Apollo was designed to fly containing pure oxygen at five pounds per square inch pressure but on the launch pad that pressure had been increased to simulate the structural stress of the inside-outside pressure difference in space closer to 20 pounds and any undergraduate engineer knows that at that pressure of pure oxygen the slightest spark will cause anything even metal to burn so fast it's almost explosive somewhere that spark had occurred and worse inflammable materials not in the original design had been allowed him velcro to hook things on foam rubber cushions for temporary comfort most unbelievable of all NASA itself had commissioned a report three years before that had stated categorically how dangerous this situation would be and so had the contractors themselves neither group had read those reports it seemed the supreme irony was that in such an atmosphere even the crew's spacesuits were in flammable mist that point in the in the understanding of what we were dealing with oxygen a massive amount of flammable materials and a spark possibility we missed that point and that was the point that at that time had been brought over from the Gemini program had brought over from the other historical events of the program in a way that we carefully run individual strips in a laboratory but we never put it all together as a system and we put all other systems together as a system and ran them and that was to me a major blind spot in the Apollo program and one which is a program manager I really can't see why we missed it but we did to the outsider though I mean to the outsider it looks so it's incredibly obvious that you should have done that so simple and so obvious and there isn't any answer that one of the things that I've noticed on other projects as well as this one as you get close to the ultimate payoff of the project and the ultimate usage you begin to go faster and faster and faster and sometimes it be just as well if you go fishing for a day or two and stop and think there were many many people who went to the President and urged him to stop this some of them said that I was a killer that they should not let me fly these equipments and yet with the president as we developed the relationship here always whether it was Kennedy or Johnson took a very simple position fly when you're ready and don't go until you already don't let the political pressures force you to go too soon and don't hold back if the time is right if the time was right for Apollo 1 the strange thing is why they had already redesigned his spacecraft the new block 2 spacecraft as it was called had a hatch that opened outwards the dead crew hadn't been able to get out because there's opened inwards well it wasn't good enough yet that's what we learned with the Apollo one fire was if we weren't quite good enough and look at what happened after that fire the first time we put man in the lock to spacecraft the one that was redesigned under new management system that worked essentially perfectly minor problems in the second time we put men in it we sent Jim and Frank and Bill around the moon so that's the kind of confidence that doing things right we'll bill I disagree with you Jack the block two spacecraft was already designed there were some modifications to it those modifications were already in work before the fire ever took place and the first spacecraft before those guys ever got killed and we had 40 or 50 major failures on every Apollo flight including the last one but I'm talking about the cosmic level Jim and I agree with it though I too was coming on Jim before the fire heads was in the process of being redesigned because we felt that there was no way that you could do an e VA through that hatch and it's right but the thing is we would never gun the hatch at the time had there not been the fire - what I've gotten a hatch at the time because it was supposed to be on a spacecraft that Dave and rusty know why which is an excellent management astronaut no this reminds me of the meet Monday morning meeting see we still have say we were I know let me make one more point because it's one I've thought about a great deal since then um I'm not sure that we would have gotten in the moon if that hadn't happened because when we then following the fire may changes look to the space map examined and tested it we found other things too one of the other things it was found even as the spacecraft wiring was being redone and made safe was that relations between North American and NASA were far from good over a year before the Apollo program director general Philips had written a secret report that had raised alarm about the quality of the contractors work at first James Webb denied its existence and then admitted it the fire forced NASA's hand Webb reacted firmly though perhaps late we took the strong view in NASA that the changes that were required had to be made and we advised them of that they did not make them and so we called in five other contractors and started to negotiate to replace them as the contractor at that moment they made all the changes that were really necessary or the first changes weren't only in design heads rolled to they discussed my position with mr. Atwood who was then president the corporation he had heard from mr. Webb and as mr. Atwood so aptly put it story they either want you out of that program or me and I'm sure it's not going to be me as things got better in the space program elsewhere they got decidedly worse the summer after the fire saw other fires of the race riots in Detroit and Newark January 68 and in Vietnam the Tet Offensive began shaking American confidence that the war there was likely to provide them with a military victory back in the United States racial violence flared up again coupled with increasing unrest on the university campuses over America's Vietnam involvement then on April the 4th in Memphis while organizing civil rights demonstrations Martin Luther King was assassinated more riots followed Robert Kennedy was the next to fall two months later in the kitchens of a hotel in Los Angeles on the 5th of June two months later the Democratic Party convention came to Chicago where Mayor Daley vowed to put down any violence phone the result was a state of virtual insurrection as the demonstrators were finally opposed by the National Guard America was shocked by a military presence on her city streets and it was time for the presidential elections and Richard Nixon tonight I again probably accept that nomination for President of the United States and news for you this fine there's a difference this time we're going to win meanwhile NASA was having its own problems because of the death of the three astronauts the contractors were under severe pressure to tripple test everything and yet stick to rigid deadlines and so in the middle of 1968 when the lunar module turned up here at Cape Kennedy for its first manned test flight the people here took one look at it and reach for their small print it was so full of faults it was as ready to fly as a brick is NASA was desperate confidence in the agency had never been lower something had to be found to joke the public into delirious rows of applause and it was not going to be the lunar module but what time was running out from January 67 or April 67 when I took over the project to the end of the decade we knew the moon was only gonna rise and said I think 30 more times in that time period it was it was a very countable number of times the moon was going to be in the right position between then and the end of the decade to me that meant getting a major flight off before the end of 1968 Lowe's idea of a major flight was to leave the lunar module behind and take the command module alone out to the moon and back with NASA under pressure in an election year and as yet no manned flight of the moon rocket this total change of plan was extraordinary why then did it succeed this took place while there was a very important International Space conference in Vienna and the administrator of NASA my boss went to this the head of the manned space flight program went to this and of course as soon as the cats were away the mice started to play and Houston immediately came to Washington and said dr. Payne we have a very interesting proposition which unfortunately in the absence of the other people we will have to bring directly to you we need a decision shall we start to prepare the software for a potential lunar orbital mission with Apollo 8 and we'd had a little discussion of this but really this was a quite a far out and bold move and I discussed this with general Phillips general Phillips remarked that he did have to tell me that before his boss had left he'd been instructed not to do something like this and I said well you're an Air Force general you're not really familiar with the traditions of the Navy let me tell you about Nelson's blind eye and I gave him a lecture on when it's a good idea to overlook a few instructions you may have received and that was the spirit in which we proceeded of course there was some dismay in the yellow and they were called to the embassy and over a scrambler telephone told about this decision Oh my initial reaction was you've laid out a careful plan that will test every facet of this equipment before we do the lunar landing and if we eliminate parts of those test plates and we have any trouble then we're in serious trouble so politically if you look at it I'm sure that Jim Webb must have thought we all had lost our minds yeah I felt that if you weren't willing to fly that flight you shouldn't be willing to fly the landing in fact that's what I said but I think his question must have been with a NASA could have before it another failure and survived did you consider the possibility of failure yes we certainly did and I think that it's not telling tales out of school to say that that and other NASA missions involving hazard we he prepared complete contingency plans including the announcement that the president would have to make about the brave astronauts who sacrifice their lives for science the moon mission would be only the second Apollo to fly and it depended on the success of the first Apollo 7 an earth orbit check-out flight if it worked the way was clear just after 7:00 flew would come the presidential elections again the political climate dominated NASA's behavior to protect the agency it was clear that James Webb would have to hand over to Tom Paine three weeks before an election you're going to fly the redesigned Apollo that in the earlier test stages kill three man if you have any kind of trouble it's going to have an effect on the election and I want it to be outside the government so I could speak my mind and take on the fight that this was the right decision and the program should go forward so President Johnson and I reached a very simple decision if I retired in October before the election and just before the Apollo 7 flight the message would be very clear to whoever would be President Humphrey or Nixon you don't have to worry about this man where that has become controversial the political and technical gamble had paid off on Christmas Day 1968 Apollo 8 carrying Frank Borman Jim Lovell and Bill Anders was in lunar orbit upon the face of the water for NASA and America it was the end of a two-year nightmare it was virtually certain right that the moon landing would happen in time they weren't occurred well you know what happened next they went to the moon and they brought back a total of over 800 pounds of moon rock now officially classified as a national treasure which is why this giant steel door exists it has two time blocks and only two people know each of the combinations of those locks so what it takes is two people to be away with flu or for some other reason and if you want to get to the rocks that's your hard luck behind that door is what's called the pristine sample vault so-called because the rocks in there have never had any contact whatsoever with the Earth's atmosphere the vault and the one next door form part of a two million dollar complex it compares very favorably with Fort Knox because it's built to withstand hurricane tornadoes landslip floods and earthquakes each room has a different air pressure so that if the air leaks it leaks out and never in from the dirty outside and the place is packed with sophisticated burglar alarms like those microwave movement detectors you may already have noticed one vital and interesting fact there are no rocks here that's because the place is finished and it isn't finished for several reasons one being money it was originally due to come from the Treasury but Congress sat on this idea so the money had to come from NASA's already reduced budget giving money to space isn't fashionable anymore and then back in 1968 when you would have thought they would have begun to build a place like this they weren't really interested in sample return analysis so much as whether or not the returning moon rocks would give us all a dose of lunar plague and anyway from the very beginning the scientists had an uphill fight trying to convince NASA that there was room for science in the missions at all well certainly at the beginning it was not all sweetness and light both personality clashes differences in understanding differences in perception of what the whole thing was about around the time of Apollo 11 the the treatment of the lunar samples which not only agitated my friend here extremely but the rest of us pretty much do the mistreatment of lunar samples there are many things at the beginning that we could find to be upset about and and shouted what what do you mean about what in one way were they mistreated Wow right the lunar samples were recognized to be of some general interest but took a great deal of exercise due to convince people that a there were not trivial but namely most substantial scientific interests in carrying out the scientific work on the rocks that the rocks would tell you something very very important and not whether liverworts grew on them if they were watered for example and that they were fundamental his history of the Sun and the solar system and the moon in those rocks and a we wanted to preserve we didn't want them dumped in sodium hypochlorite solution were pumped through a vacuum chamber and somebody wanted to do some good science with them and these three scientists were as responsible as anybody for the fact that Apollo did anything scientific thanks to their pressure on the NASA planners early on not that much comfort came from Apollo 11 immediately after touchdown the vital grab sample taken in case they had to leave in a hurry was followed by a full length as planned at lunar surface period in which the rock samples were also grabbed in the last 20 minutes thanks to various PR efforts Neil and Buzz the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words over with your honor go ahead mr. president this is here to announce hello Neil and Buzz I'm talking to you by telephone from the oval room at the White House and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made I just can't tell you how proud we are of which for every American this has to be the proudest day of our lives and for people all over the world when Apollo 11 landed on the moon few people outside NASA realized just how close they had come to disaster in the last few minutes before touchdown for the people in NASA who did know well they had fulfilled Kennedy's promise but they had also found out that doing so was a very dangerous business and there were those who pointed out that Kennedy had after all promised only one landing and had said nothing at all about going on to do scientific things afterwards there was a strong factor in the agency after Apollo 11 got back that's all for Apollo let's do something else you haven't remember the main just tell me what I got there's a mass of people most of them are research people if once they have done the research and all the development to get somebody to the moon a lot of the people who really control the programs we're looking at the middle I think it was also a concern that we'd have somebody get on the moon not be able to get off and in the trauma of having somebody get killed on a lunar mission would be more than the agency could recover from I think that we short-side we had that problem right from the beginning but one of the things you have to remember is that the people who were in the management slots had been in it for a long time starting from Mercury and you get pretty old after a while when the pressures on you like that for a long long time it sort of gets old did you feel with Apollo 11 you had fulfilled the promise that kennedy had made and that really that was all in terms of risking people's lives what to do how are your feelings well we felt that we had to fulfill the landing promised it that mr. Kennedy had made what we felt that that there was a system design and and a number of units that could be used to learn a great deal more about the moon and we were recognized that we should go on and make more flights but I mean you yourself toyed with the idea of stopping well I didn't want to go on forever now what had to be understood at the time of Apollo 11 the first and prime aim had to be to get there get there safely and get home do some science but not to overload the ship not to overload the crew we had never been to the moon man had never walked on the moon so the amount of science that could be done probably had to be curtailed but we know we were going back yeah but I don't think we were here responsible in the sense that we realized that scientists that the first objective was to get people to the moon and get them back safely it was our desire that having done that that you maximize the return and on Apollo 11 that clearly was not done even with the primitive system you had then just as a trivial example we're on the same committee supposedly responsible responsible not supposedly responsible responsible for the distribution of the samples and yet we were forbidden to talk to the astronauts who are in the same building that was obviously a ludicrous situation and a perversion of this desire to get people there and back without endangering their lives because of science serious science on the moon only began towards the end of the missions in particular the last three in all Apollo brought back 383 kilograms of rock from six sites not ideal spots but a compromise between science and safety Canada back mr. k2o walked right into your area right and because of necessary opposition to the idea it was not until the last mission that the first geologists went what further reflections I've been floored there is a file well don't move it till I see it it's all over orange and it's orange when I put my visor up it's short cheers crazy I've got a big attraction this was one of the great disappointments on the last mission the crew came across orange soil was it that color because there was water or recent volcanic activity in the form of small vents or funerals the geologists on the moon at the time thought so I'm not gonna do it but if they ever was done that look like a funeral oration isn't it as they found later they were wrong but the excitement had caused helped keep morale high during the diminishing number of minutes left before exploration of the moon would cease for the foreseeable future and that time was another drawback no matter how scientifically vital it might have been to stay longer and look harder the astronauts oxygen supply was all that counted there is enough time Tony Hawk to do it no matter which way you want to do it we need more time with me other than with the stolen to say they gotta leave one time that's all we can say if they want to get more horse that's great we should balance Queen but let's hope they don't have to walk back as for the orange soil it turned out to get its color from microscopic glass spheres evidence of intense heat but not of recent volcanic activity and certainly not of water which was absent from all the rocks brought to the receiving lab except one box full which caused momentary excitement when it was found to be damp but the answer was human contamination facilities for handling extraterrestrial materials have to be immaculate and the original labs in Houston were not quite that good but the scientists were delighted enough once they got their first close look at the samples to forgive NASA's penny-pinching and get down to some close analysis no unknown chemistry was found but a few new minerals were identified you don't have to be a mineralogist to appreciate the effect of polarized light on a very thin slice of rock conversely it seems you don't have to be a layman to get a layman's thrill from getting hold of your first moon rock what's a piece of the Holy Grail and it still is for many of us and most of us still treated as rather sacrosanct objects it was a big trip less than half the Apollo rocks were cut up and sent to the 118 labs it had successfully applied for a chunk of Holy Grail the rest had to be stored indefinitely ask a fragment of rock the right questions and it can tell you as long as the position it was in when it was found is precisely documented how old it is how hot it's been the history of the Sun during its lifetime what magnetic fields it's been in and so on the profusion of all the experimental instruments placed on the lunar surface perhaps that measuring the flow of heat out from the interior provided the most important information about the structure of the Moon when its findings were put together with those of the seismographic measurements taken by the network of moonquake detectives placed at the six landing sites so far that information together with the rest adds up to this it looks as if the moon has a solid outer crust down to about 60 kilometers depth inside that there's some kind of mental perhaps like the Earth's below about a thousand kilometers however seismic evidence cuts off and leaves a question mark heat flow data say it can't be a molten core but it might be a molten shell round a solid core so going to the moon hasn't answered the lunar structure question it's complicated it the thing that's missing which most of us really feel is the big gap or the things are referred to by Jim namely the Highlands which cover most of the moon about which we know the least and where we have very very limited samples except for a few chunks that got knocked in by major impacts there's of course where we hunger for information and that's where the early history of the moon is was a Berg's lab has worked out the sequence of lunar history by dating when fragments of rock will last melted by the heat of meteor impact certain trace elements will give that date so the fragments are dissolved in acid and the tiny droplet is vaporized on a hot wire the wire is heated in a mass spectrometer and the trace element atoms are counted what the bugs results have been startling before apollo the moon was thought to be somewhere around four billion years old formed perhaps by the accretion process our coming together of giant chunks of rock that other chunks continued to bombard the lunar surface in a steadily decreasing rate until now after years of work with the apollo samples was a berg is certain that the moon is four point four five billion years old like the earth but that bombardment fell off sharply then a second major phase of bombardment happened quite separately and then the rate dropped to its present level what happened in that early gap is still unknown the bombardment history that was discovered was exactly what no one would have expected in fact we're still arguing about it in which one may conclude with a great deal of certainty that somehow someone has stored out some small planets in some outer part of the solar system possibly the asteroid belt for a long time like a half a billion years and then through the men so they fell on the other planets this left an enormous imprint on the moon so that it may be governing the pock marks we see in the moon and by transference may be the only chronometer we have for the rest of the rocky bodies in the solar system so now when you look at Mars mercury and maybe Venus the big atmosphere you now have a time constant time scale which is transferable which also means that the earth was bombarded then I don't think any of us would have attributed major lake bombardment to a normal solar system process and that was a pretty substantial discovery so we then had to reassess what the mechanisms of planetary evolution were like and I would say that in terms of understanding planets that was our first other planet what about origin do you know the origin of the Moon uh oh you know ten years ago before Apollo of course there were lots of guesses because nobody knew anything but the minute the facts came and it quieted all that speculation now it is reappeared maybe that means that the samples and mainly the samples are about to yield us an answer maybe a doesn't I don't know but it's fun to watch right now it's an example of how ongoing the research process is still very vigorous in 1979 it's not so vigorous in some areas in 1977 budget cuts forced NASA to turn off the last of the Apollo lunar surface experiment packages left there by the astronauts their goal with the switch off the stream of day-to-day information coming back from the moon ceased so as to save a few more valuable dollars for NASA's other ventures a few modest unmanned visits to the planets but for those involved in Apollo the irony in these planetary expeditions is that they could have been done without any of the manned space flight experience so if Apollo was worth all the colossal expense to bring together a team of unparalleled technical ability to build a complex transportation system designed only to take men to the moon why junket after only a half a dozen trips it's like building an airplane like a 747 flying at once and say yep really works and then putting it in the hangar I don't think people ought to do things like that we would have liked very much to have had the American public and the press and the Congress and the administration say now that we have explored our nearest neighbor the moon we would like to give NASA an even more challenging objective for the next decade moving out to our sister planet Mars that would have been a magnificent mission for NASA and we would certainly have welcomed but it would have been essentially a continuation of what I might call the barnstorming era of NASA the national mood in America has gone a long way from the exuberance from the competitive spirit from the confidence that characterized the NASA era at the time of the kennedy decision to go to the moon doing something like that was politically very popular six seven eight years later it was not so mr. Nixon made the decisions that he had to make at that time given political realities although I very much wish he had done much more for space it looks as if the end of Apollo is a compromise that NASA had to accept or risk the end of manned spaceflight altogether Apollo died as it was born to satisfy the needs of a new president and yet Apollo was a unique endeavor unique in the sense that for a brief moment 10 years ago it United to the people of America and the rest of the world in a way that they had never been united before and have not been since in that sense Kennedy was right most of us were impressed did we get anything else out of it I think so not as yet from looking closely at the moon we don't even know where it came from and the knowledge has not told us where to go to get the raw materials we so desperately need as we thought it would Computers and micro miniaturization well Paolo really only speeded up developments that we're already happening but Apollo gave us two things that we wouldn't have had otherwise one of them you never see and yet it surrounds you it's just not headline material that's all and it comes from thousands of little factories like this one at Hall Park in Long Island in the early 60s this small engineering firm was making that no one it is well it hardly matters but it makes the point it's a one-way fuel valve for the lunar module fuel can flow that way but it can't flow that way as a matter of fact this was never used because it's part of a backup system and the primary system worked flawlessly flawless engineering is the point of the story see because there were men on that rocket every part made for Apollo had to be guaranteed to work with a reliability of 99.9999 2% now although that generated a colossal amount of paperwork it brought a large number of small companies about 2500 m around America into contact with the extreme demands of high technology and the testing techniques which they used here and the management systems you need to make something that reliable today these people are using exactly those techniques in telecommunications and others are doing similarly different things zero defect engineering reliability demonstration tests systems analysis their abstract concepts but they affect our lives much more profoundly than Teflon frying pans or pacemakers because of Apollo every bit of high technology around you fails just that little bit less often the other thing that came out of Apollo is much less easy to analyze because although it may be the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to us since we came out of the caves there's absolutely nothing material you can point out that it did for us I mean simply the fact that human beings have actually seen that as a matter of fact you know you could take your thumb and you could hide the earth behind your thumb and then you realized that all that you love and all that you know all your your life and your knowledge is really behind your thumb and that you're really just an insignificant little part of this great universe it gives you really sort of a humble feeling and a more of a perspective of your part in this universe Oh Oh Oh

Channel: El Toyotero

Views: 200,433

Keywords: Moon, James Burke, Apollo Program (Space Program)

Id: puWbQ1b-ljU

Length: 57min 19sec (3439 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 31 2014