My name is john charles. I will be your moderator. I retired from nasa a year and a half ago. I have been living at my childhood families, playing here with the artifacts. It gives me the opportunity to sit on the stage with heroes of the apollo era. People who did the work i only dreamed of doing. We have with those two individuals who worked during the Lunar Service service exploration activities. That was the work done on the moon. Its the reason for the apollo moon missions. Not just to have a big rocket or their landing. The objective was to get to the moon and to the moon and do something useful. Arthur schmidt, who goes by larry, who was involved in the operations activities. Laterally on the missions, helping navigate the lunar rover. When dell mandel. He is an icon of lunar science as far as the early days. He came out here in 1963 and it was here for the lunar landings. Mendell has been responsible for understanding the lunar landings and rewriting the test books about what the history of the moon is all about. I would like each of them to describe their experiences during the program, with emphasis on apollo 11. Any other interesting stories you may have. Then we will have questions and answers during the bottom half of the hour. Mr. Schmidt, please tell me about your experience on apollo and what your recollections were. What your recollections are. Mr. Schmidt thank you. Ask a question every time you like. He said i was a hero. I dont view it as such. I just had a job during a policy. 17. It was so much fun i still like to talk about, every chance i get to talk about my job that i had back then, i do that. Thats why i am here today. I was the navigator for the rover. You have seen it, i am sure. Have a dipolenot or dipolar magnetic field. We had a gyro on the rover. We had to set up the rover. We used the sun. And the in the east shadow points west in the morning. Theas easy to figure out sun angle. We used that to align the gyro. Rover, then, the astronauts on the rover gave us coordinates in the bearing. I was on the ground. I use those coordinates to figure out coordinates and cartesian coordinates, where i could plot it out on a map. Thats how i kept track of the rover while it was on the moon. That is how we set up the rover to go on the moon. If you have been to Mission Control, if you havent on the tour, you need to do that. Its an interesting tour. Its very realistic. I was not in the main room. I was in the back room. I was in the science support room. Had an overhead projector. When you go on the store and you look at the displays they have. They are very realistic. The one on the immediate left, for apollo 11, they had an animation of the guy coming down the steps of the rover. During apollo 16 and 17, that would have been my map. It would have been displayed therefore the front room. The rest of the world that wanted to look in and see what the astronauts were doing on the moon. Abouti am thinking Mission Control in the tour, there are couple of things they dont tell you when you go on that is interesting. Hadis, the dress code we was formal. I had a new suit and a vast and i shined my shoes before he went to work everyday. By the time things got going in there, flight controllers shed their coats and their ties, and they were in their shirt sleeves, so thats usually what you see on tv. We considered it business. We wanted to be very professional, so the dress code was very formal. Another thing was, everybody smoked back then. Almost everybody smoked. The rooms were full of smoke. They would smoke cigars or cigarettes. If you did not smoke, you would come to work, and theyre always offering you a cigarette. Au would consider it hazardous environment today, i suppose. That was a lot different. It was a lot of fun. There were two shifts we work. 212 hour shift on duty. The whole shift was 14 hours. There was an hour before you went on console that you briefed the team, or you got briefed by the team that was leaving. An hour after you left the console, to brief the team coming on. You were at Mission Control for 14 hours. Teamunterpart on the other was a lady named anarcho. Anna. She did not want to go home. She was up all night, and she would be doing the planning for the next day, for the mission we would execute. She was excited. I said, you have to go home and get some rest. She said, no. I have to see what is going on. It was that interesting. It was really hard to go home. I can hardly describe it. It was fun. I really enjoyed doing it. Any questions . Mendellts let dr. Talk about it for a second. I assume i turned by mike on. That when youd hit a switch, it goes from red to green. I did not tell them i was colorblind. Larry came to work at the Spacecraft Center in 1962, which is the very beginning. I was a year later, fresh out of college. Organizationin an called the lunar Surface Technology branch. It was part of a larger organization, whose job it was, to write down, in a formal document, all of the characteristics of the moon, the space environment, radiation, meteoroids, so on, so the engineers could design the spacecraft and lander and operations, and such things correctly. In those days, there was not much known about the moon. So part of our job was to try to or to let experiments contracts to aerospace companies, it which is what we did to vary study various aspects and understand what that environment was like. In the late 60s, that group got transformed into a Phd Level Research group of the kind you would find at a university department, primarily people who were experts at studying samples, because, big deal, was to bring back samples from the moon, which would tell us things that geologists and geochemists could determine about where the moon came from, what its characteristics are, what its relationship is to the earth, what sort of process might occurred. I was in the middle of Science Research group. It was very exciting for me, because as a person interested in science and interested in new discoveries, it was extraordinarily exciting. Stage, is i am this because, during apollo 17, i did sit on the third floor of Mission Control at a console, whose buttons had been disabled. I was a scientist. Me was thatcern for i would not screw up anything. , could talk to a contractor about the experiment that i was involved with. I could talk to a nasa employee somewhere, and i could listen on a loop to the Flight Operations director and things were happening. The experiment i was involved with on apollo 17 was in orbit. It was not on the surface. It was an infrared detector that would mask thermal properties of the moon. I have been working on a topic since 1963. Eventually the results from that experiment became my doctoral thesis at rice university. Wanting tod about work for a long time at Mission Control. I did not really have that much of a choice. Anybody who is familiar with the science experience that go on today, you can look into the papers and see a long list of names of graduate students and professors and research scientists, all of whom were part of a science team. There were two people on my team. There was my thesis advisor, and me. He was an infrared galactic astronomer who did not care much about the moon. He had taken on this experiment because he was an expert in technology, and he did it so i would have some reason to exist. We had to divide up the 24 hour 8 00and he got the a. M. 8 00 p. M. , get the 8 00 p. M. , it 00 p. M. 8 00 a. M. Shift. A. M. Shift. 8 00 you might think i got the short end of the stick. But the thing was, Mission Control was on houston time. So when i was on, the astronauts were asleep. Ron evans was asleep in the command module and the others were on the surface. When astronauts sleep, they turn on the experiments in the command module, and let them run. They are not interfering with anything. When i was there, there was data coming in. I got to see the exciting things we were hoping to find and measure on the moon. When my thesis advisor was there, they were constantly turning things on and off. People were interrupting him and he got very perturbed because he thought his experiment should be more important. I guess i have one more story. Wasnt deeply, i involved with the operations that larry and his colleagues were. One of the things they would pocket were little cards, about the size of a business card, which would give the times for special events. Launch was delayed for two hours, because of a technical issue. When they finally took off, they changed the trajectory sliced lately, so that after three or four hours, they were back on the timeline that was in the operations,plan for with times where everything was going to happen. It was confusing because there realtime, and imaginary time, that agreed with all of the operations, so it is in the middle of the night on my console, and it is disabled, and then, on the left side, button starts flashing. I tried toound, and decide what to do. In my room, there was nothing but little groups of scientists. All the operations people were downstairs. I pushed the button. The boys ask, is this the Johnson Space center . I said, yes it is. After a minute or two, i began to realize i was talking to an air force officer who was under Cheyenne Mountain in colorado, where they have all of the radars and Nuclear Warheads and everything else. This air force officer wanted to know, what was the time of reentry of the apollo 17 command module . The reason being, it might look like a Ballistic Missile coming in from the soviet union. They did not want to make a mistake. I am the worst person to ask this. I reach in my pocket of my shirt and i pull out my card and i was sure the times on that card were correct because of these trajectory manipulations. , said, i think it is coming in i forget what the time was, 10 00 a. M. , or something. All she says is that zulu . I said, is that what . Meantime. Reenwich as an astronomer background, i understand what greenwich meantime is. I said, no, i think this is Central Standard time. He said, ok. Thank you very much. He hung up, then i started to worry. I got on the loop, and for the few people i could talk to, i said, i think i should tell you about something. The time i gave him was correct. The Flight Operations officer, who i could normally not talk to, but could listen to me, congratulated me on saving the space program. [applause] [laughter] thats my one war story. I would like to say, that is a scientist, we were really interested in, and excited about the astronauts were doing and why they were there. Larry did not tell you this, but in a science support room, there was a group of geologists, who had been intimately involved in the planning of the apollo 17 mission, trying to understand and answer certain important questions about the moon, which they thought the landing site would tell them. Those were the people that i and when the astronauts had completed their operations, the results from the experiments, everything, came they wereear, and examined and distributed to other Scientific Research groups. What was i going to say . I wanted to say one more thing. They were astronauts. They usually had an engineering background. Sometimes mathematics, like buzz aldrin. These astronauts went through thousands of hours of geological training, to help them understand how to talk to the scientists and understand what they were seeing on the surface of the moon. Of themankly, some loved it and some of them hated credit ofwant to give the very best people on the surface of the moon, from the scientific perspective were jack schmidt, a professional geologist on apology apollo 17. He is still active today, talking about leader research. The second one i want to mention is john young, who is more famous for being the super astronaut Space Shuttle pilot, apollo pilot, a legend on the astronaut corps. He was a really good student of geology. The scientists who sent them to the apollo 16 site told him to look for a certain kind of rock there. That is what they wanted. He got there and said those kinds of rocks are not here. There is another kind of rock. They said shut up, and pick up the rocks we want. Astronauts collected the sample and when all the way back home. John young argued in the back about as to what they saw on site. When they got home, the geologists were wrong and john young was right. The other one was Dave Scott Apollo 15. He was a tremendous student of geology, is still around today and did some Amazing Things around the site. Operation, which was tonned, was also designed return specific scientific results that helped us to learn what we now know about the moon. Was a tremendous breakthrough in our knowledge. John thank you. Let me follow up with some questions. Negligent to i am remind everybody in the audience that as soon as we are finished, ive been asked to ask you to move quickly to the exit, so the next crowd can come in for the next presentation. Thank you in advance for that. I want to get you to you, mr. Schmidt. Could you talk a little bit about how the lunar rover, why it needed to have direction finding equipment . Astronauts seee it anywhere they were. There were no force or buildings impeding their view. When you talk about the peculiarities of navigating on the lunar surface . Mr. Schmidt sure. But first, i would like to tell a story. In the ssr, the science room, his colleagues were around the table. They were older gentleman at the time. They were the top geologists from major universities around the country. With are older guys beards. They typically smoked a pipe, glasses, usually very settled and quiet. And sat around a table there were two kinds of geologists, the guys in craters, ejected from the craters, as i understand it. Im not a geologist. Professorsgeology that were interested in volcanoes. They were looking for younger volcanoes than the ones that made the moon. They were looking for evidence of young volcanoes. Success not had much with volcanoes and apollo 15 and 16. So we planned the stops and where we were supposed to directly rover and to get samples of the lunar surface. They were looking for young volcanoes stuff. These guys are around the table and they are to us. , and itme a moment reminds me of being at an astros game, when the astros are behind and you get to the last inning, and all of a sudden, you hit the homerun with the bases loaded in the crowd goes dessert. Berserk. Thats what it was like. Heres an schmidt, he got to a crater, and he picked up a rock and said, i found an orange rock. Sign ofught that was a a young volcano. These guys went they levitated. [laughter] rock hmidt an orange level, one of the astronauts earlier, was in a reverie. Easy, it wase it like a food fight in a high school cafeteria. They were so excited. I will never forget that moment. Anyway, the moon does not have a dipolar magnetic field, secant cant use a compass. So there was a little gyro driven compass, so they could spin it up, and it would hold, it would hold the needle steady as the rover turned. For any given time, we can calculate using the same mathematics that deal with celestial navigation on boats, the sun angle. After the astronauts got out of the rover,d sat on they would park it and there was a gauge, and they would take the time and calculate the sun angle. The rover also had a little computer that counted the revolutions of the wheels. Had it set, you could count the revolutions of the wheels going north or south or east and west and it could. Alculate the range [sound drop] dr. Mendell it could calculate range. Mr. Schmidt it could calculate range. Thats how they would return. They would read out range and bearing, and on the ground, i could calculate latitude and longitude on the map. They could see where these geologist were. Astronauts needed directions to go to the creator, i could tell him much direction to go to. The extra vehicular activities outside of the module, there were three of them on each mission. They got more complex on each mission. A loop. O 17, they did the idea was to take the astronauts first, take the astronauts the furthest away from the lunar module that they wanted to go to get samples, so that is the use the consumables and their portable lifesupport system on the back of the spacesuit, they would get closer to the lam. Lim. The idea was, that if it broke down, they had to walk back. We had to make sure that if something went wrong with the rover, they could get off of the rover and walked back before they ran out of oxygen. Ok. John thats a good bit of background. I think ive used it in my life to plan excursions, to start as far away as possible and then work your way back. I wanted to ask one more question. The geologists were capable of many things, such as and preventing thermonuclear war, how did they find time to rewrite the books about lunar history . What can you say about the revisions to lunar history between the time between the time of apollo in the time analyzed the samples . Dr. Mendell how long do you want me to talk . [laughter] dr. Mendell five minutes, he says. Missions, apollo there were debates among very famous and intelligent and educated people, about exactly what the moon was and one Nobel Prize Winner believed that the moon was just a collection of things that were part of the early solar system, and that when we landed on the moon and picked up the things, we would pick up pieces that were formed at the time of the formation of the sun and learn of the processes that went on during the early solar system. People with geological backgrounds, and one of the more famous ones was jean shoemaker, believed that the features on the surface of the moon, they look like lava flows. Flows, then lava that implied something about the heating history of the moon, the want the moon at one time had been hot. Andpieces had melted differentiated like the earth, where there is a crust and a mantle and decor, and so, the ,oon would have layers to it and the lovers from the amount love array, would be from wouldva and the lava have a crust. They were geologists who believed the circular features on the moon were volcanoes. Time, in the 50s in particular, anything circular and the earth was called a volcano. If they studied the rock surrounded and they did not seem to fit the idea of a volcano, they were called crypto volcanoes. Meaning, they were around, so they must be a volcano, but we dont know what kind of volcano this was. Moonf the debates on the was whether