The Rock From Mars (42 page)

Sitting in the back
• Author interview with McKay; see also Kranz,
Failure Is Not an Option,
p. 278.

The stomach-clenching
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
pp. 200–1; Kranz,
Failure Is Not an Option,
p. 292.

From the moment
• Author interview with McKay; see also Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
pp. 212, 215–16. The landing, lunar surface excursion, and delivery of specimens to JSC are captured in NASA videos, including JSC Production 554 and PMU: 11/49473-HQ 194.

Apollo in the early 1960s
• Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox,
Apollo
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 79 (citing an account by
Life
magazine writer Hugh Sidey).

See also Walter A. McDougall,
. . . the Heavens and the Earth
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 141–95. In 1961, President Kennedy committed the United States to putting “a man” on the moon before the decade was out, and returning him safely. The move had been spurred by a spasm of public awe and fright over the “space gap” first revealed by the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. Sputnik demonstrated that the Soviets had the capability to launch nuclear warheads into our cities (the threat alone was a valuable commodity). And the ongoing “gap”—manifest in a series of Soviet firsts in spaceflight—suggested the enemy might also win in the Cold War theater of public relations. Capitalism and democracy were facing off against communism and tyranny in a battle for world dominion. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the “high frontier” was, for a time, the primary arena for a symbolic victory.

It proved to be
• Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley”
Esquire
(Dec. 1983): pp. 346–74.

Author Norman Mailer
• Walter A. McDougall,
. . . the Heavens and the Earth,
p. 412.

David McKay was
• Donald Goldsmith,
The Hunt for Life on Mars
(New York: Dutton / Penguin, 1997), p. 67.

Still, two of the
• Author interviews with David McKay and Mary Fae McKay.

In the early sixties
• Author interviews with Wendell Mendell, of Johnson Space Center; see also Murray and Cox,
Apollo,
p. 131.

“For eight months
• Tom Wolfe,
The Right Stuff
(New York: Bantam, 1980), pp. 295–96.

But the resistance
• Murray and Cox,
Apollo,
pp. 130–33.

(It was being invented
• Don E. Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), pp. xii, 58; see also Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 385.

First, there were
• Author interviews with McKay, Wendell Mendell, and others. See also Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
pp. 76–78 and 80–84.

Then there was another
• Author interview with McKay.

At the birth of Apollo
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 58, 192–93; see also Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
pp. 383–410.

President Kennedy had
• McDougall,
. . . the Heavens and the Earth,
p. 309, 315–24; see also John M. Logsdon, “An Apollo Perspective,”
Astronautics & Aeronautics
(Dec. 1979): pp. 112–17, and Logsdon’s
The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 94–100, 111. This subject has been covered in a number of space histories and is preserved in copious congressional records and other documents. See also online material for Apollo at the NASA history site: www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History.

The space agency
• McDougall,
. . . the Heavens and the Earth,
p. 374, regarding pork-barrel politics.

But once it dawned
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
pp. 55–58.

In order to force
• McDougall,
. . . the Heavens and the Earth,
pp. 381–82, citing Webb’s words in
Space Age Management: The Large-Scale Approach
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), pp. 113, 117; Webb’s address at the Milwaukee Press Club Gridiron Dinner, April 17, 1963, as reported in NASA,
The American Space Program: Its Meaning and Purpose,
HHN-47 (Dec. 1964), p. 25; and an interview with Webb by Harvey et al., March 16, 1968, pp. 16–17, at NASA headquarters.

Some of the most
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 84; Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
pp. 383–97.

Many in the astronaut
• Wolfe,
The Right Stuff,
pp. 317–18.

As they taught
• Author interview with McKay.

But many astronauts
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 122, and Michael Collins,
Carrying the Fire
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 72–75.

But there were
• Author interview with McKay; see also Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 122.

And the broader tensions
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 389.

McKay was admitted
• Author interview with McKay.

To a degree that is
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
pp. 67, 97, and 146. Eventually, it would be shown that as early as 1964, based on findings from the robotic Ranger craft, Harold Urey and Gene Shoemaker had solved much of the riddle, introducing the term
gardening
to indicate how the pulverized surface layer was formed (in churning by constant impacts), and correctly predicting its properties, such as a thickness that varied up to a few tens of meters and a bearing strength that increased with depth (meaning that the astronauts and vehicle would not sink in). Later, after studying the findings from Surveyor spacecraft, Shoemaker named the lunar surface layer
regolith,
a term previously applied to loose material on Earth’s surface. Shoemaker would maintain that the Surveyor missions provided better information about the lunar surface debris than did Apollo.

For example, was
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
pp. 67, 97, and 146; Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 180. The reference is to astronomer Thomas Gold. Despite images from the Surveyor series, which had landed safely on the moon, he argued that the moon was covered by a deep layer of powder so fine it amounted to airy fluff and advised that the astronauts drop colored weights during landing to see whether the objects sank in, aborting the touchdown if necessary.

As one had observed
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 180; reference is to NASA’s Elbert King.

During his two-hour
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
pp. 202, 206. Wilhelms notes that in the book
Moon Rocks
(New York: Dial, 1970)
New
Yorker
writer Henry S. F. Cooper recorded some of the “skirmishes in the tug-of-war between scientists’ emotions and the facts” during the lunar surface explorations and the arrival of the first specimens.

He reported that
• NASA archives,
Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal,
p. 74; Back on Earth, Armstrong would praise his geology teachers and add modestly that, although he enjoyed geology, “Had I been a better geologist, I might have seen some things [on the lunar surface] that were important, that I missed. If that’s true, I regret it. But in the time we had available, I think everyone did a pretty credible job.”

By the time
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 218; see also NASA
Apollo 11
archives.

Less than a week
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
p. 233. Also, Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 208, expresses disbelief that the only scientific debriefing of the
Apollo 11
crew was one he participated in while the astronauts were still in quarantine, on August 6, 1969. If that’s true, he said, “you have a fine illustration of NASA’s attitude toward science.” He also remarks on the “stingy” nature of the camera NASA provided for the mission, which resulted in those “fuzzy, ghostly images.”

Armstrong had decided
• Author interview with McKay.

Two nights later
• Chaikin,
Man on the Moon,
pp. 233, 355–66; Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 344. Until the lunar samples arrived, Nobel laureate chemist Harold Urey and others known as “cold mooners” had championed the theory that the moon was a primordial lump essentially unchanged since the formation of the solar system (except for craters and plains formed by violent impacts). The opposition “hot mooners” held that volcanic activity had shaped the face of the moon. The majority of geologists had straddled the two camps, allowing for a combination—“cosmic impact catastrophes” alternating with gentle volcanic extrusions and an occasional fire fountain from deep in the interior, according to Wilhelms, p. 344.

The art of handling
• Author interviews with Mendell, Gibson, and others.

The rock custodians
• Gibson, in interviews with the author, said the scientists working to eliminate potential contaminants ran into resistance from engineers, who argued that they needed certain of the offending materials—“until they were told and understood” the reason for the changes. The cleanup group decreed that only stainless steel, aluminum, and Teflon could come into contact with the samples.

After three landing missions
• A legend would persist within NASA for decades about a common Earth bacterium (
Streptococcus mitis,
typically found in the human mouth, throat, and nose) that was found nestled inside a camera from a 1966 unmanned Surveyor mission that astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean retrieved from the lunar surface in 1969, during the
Apollo 12
mission, and brought back to Earth. Analysts at the NASA lab in Houston concluded that the microbe had flown from Earth to the moon and survived all those years in the vacuum. However, scientists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention soon determined that the microbe had never left Earth, but that someone had most likely contaminated the camera during postflight examination in Houston. NASA concurred. (See Kathy Sawyer, “Hardy Microbes Appear Able to Survive in Space,”
Washington Post,
Oct. 4, 1999, p. A11, and F. J. Mitchell and W. L. Ellis,
Analysis of Surveyor 3 Material and Photographs Returned by Apollo 12,
esp. “XI. Microbe Survival Analyses, Part A, 239–251”; note in particular “Results,” on p. 250 [Washington, D.C.: NASA; Scientific and Technical Information Office, 1972].)

McKay was in
• Author interviews with McKay.

Because McKay knew that most
• Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
pp. 97, 146, 342; regolith included not only soil but fragmented bedrock, bits of glass from impacts, and other loose material.

McKay teamed up
• Author interview with McKay. McKay’s coauthors were two other young geologists, Don Morrison and Bill Greenwood.

As McKay and his
• Author interviews with McKay and dozens of published papers, including: D. S. McKay and A. Basu, “The Production Curve for Agglutinates in Planetary Regoliths,”
Journal of Geophysical Research
88 (1983): pp. B-193–99; and L. A. Taylor and D. S. McKay, “Benefication of Lunar Rocks and Regolith: Concepts and Difficulties,” in
Engineering, Construction and Operations in Space III,
vol. I (New York: ASCE, 1992), pp. 1058–69. The studies would show that the micrometeorite bombardment melted and vaporized the grains of lunar topsoil; the vapor was redeposited, and the melted material, before it resolidified, scavenged dusty material from nearby and incorporated it. The result of all this business was new and different particles (the agglutinates), aggregates of minerals, rocks, and glasses welded, or cemented, together. The glass in the fragile material further broke down, producing ever-increasing amounts of glass in the soils as they aged. The higher the proportion, the longer the soil had been exposed to the impacts—and therefore the more “mature” it was.

See also Wilhelms,
To a Rocky Moon,
p. 342, about the “strange optical properties of the lunar surface and the full moon.” The brightness “depends mainly on the quantity and composition of glass-bound agglutinates that are created by incessant small impacts in regoliths. The agglutinates get their darkness and color from the iron and titanium in the rock from which they formed.”

In 2004, President George W. Bush’s proposal that NASA start working toward a return of robots and humans to the moon triggered a new round of seminars and studies about the lunar surface, particularly how best to produce up to one thousand tons of simulated lunar soil for training and the like, given its unique properties. See L. A. Taylor, “The Need for Lunar Soil Simulants for ISRU Studies,” University of Tennessee, for the Space Resources Roundtable, Board of Directors, 2004. Taylor mentions McKay, along with himself and others, as “ ‘lunatics’ of the first order, experts in the physical, chemical and geotechnical properties of lunar regolith, and the best qualified for this endeavor.”

Inside his tribe
• Goldsmith,
Hunt for Life on Mars,
p. 69. See also Taylor, “Need for Lunar Soil Simulants.”

In 1971, when Coulter
• Mary Fae Coulter, in interviews with the author, said she was not particularly religious—David was more of a believer—but she wanted a church ceremony, not a civil one. They decided to hold the service in the Rice Chapel. The university chaplain was a Methodist, and he would officiate only with the Methodist text. But Coulter, her 1960s feminist consciousness freshly raised, wasn’t comfortable with the patriarchal tone of it, with its “honor and obey,” and its “man and wife.” She was pleasantly surprised, then, when her husband-to-be, after reading the Methodist wording, told her, “I don’t like it. We need to find a Presbyterian.”