The Rock From Mars (5 page)

At the same time, McKay was learning to navigate the jungle of rivalries that made up the fledgling space bureaucracy. From a young age, he’d disliked confrontation and conflict. But now he had landed himself in something of a vipers’ nest.

First, there were the fault lines
inside
the ranks of the scientists. Civil servant geologists working for the upstart NASA, for example, found themselves in abrasive competition with geologists from the venerable U.S. Geological Survey, which had been founded in 1879 to coordinate scientific exploration of the American West. Early in the Apollo days, the USGS folks thought they had a deal that would give them control over the returning moon samples. In their view, NASA had reneged, and they resented it. Each side had its share of aggressive people who liked to run things. Though the most serious infighting occurred before his arrival, McKay felt the tension, mostly when his team got into squabbles with the USGS over who should be teaching the geology courses. Personally, McKay got along with Shoemaker and other USGS people. He did not intend to let the turf wars divert him.

Then there was another divide—between the scientists, on one side, and the engineers, who managed agency programs and built and flew things, on the other. In the roaring, young 1960s culture of the “right stuff” that McKay had entered, his crowd was often regarded as tech support—necessary nuisances, or worse. Noting that Building 31, the science building, was the only one on-site with black columns along its facade, McKay and his coworkers used to joke that this must designate them as the black sheep of the family.

At the birth of Apollo, it was far from inevitable that any astronaut would be doing a lick of geological research on the moon, and as late as 1968, NASA managers recommended deleting most of the geology from the first landing mission.

President Kennedy had proposed the Apollo missions not in the name of science but out of an urgent desire to win a symbolic victory over the Communist enemy. The congressional mandate for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was to innovate, to lead the world in space spectaculars, to demonstrate the superiority of America and its capitalist, democratic system (with a lowercase
d
). The space agency was above all an engineering organization built on the bedrock of politics, with a pork barrel perpetually rolling through.

But once it dawned on them that the moon landings might actually happen, the champions of science—led by the feisty, crusading USGS geologist Gene Shoemaker—started dogging NASA and Congress for a role. They argued that if the country was going to fire a barrage of tax dollars toward the moon, those few guys who got to go might as well do something useful out there. In 1964, NASA grudgingly agreed to plan a package of lunar experiments and even to hire some actual
scientists
to fly in space (as long as they could also fly jets).

Still, the space agency retained its own special approach even when it came to scientific research. In order to force the changes required by the Apollo buildup, NASA administrator James Webb saw to it that NASA “purposefully spread the wealth,” as one historian noted, “and even pioneered the noncompetitive contract in order to save time and foster specific skills” throughout industry. The agency pointedly “refused to go along with the old concept that scientific merit was the only determinant of who got a grant,” sometimes favoring second-rate universities whether or not their proposals were the most deserving. “Thus, NASA pioneered reverse discrimination in order to foster expertise in more regions (and please more congressmen).”

This strain inherent in NASA’s culture—a certain disregard for the usual scientific standards combined with its deference to practical politics—would generate waves of conflict and credibility problems for the agency long after its Cold War underpinnings had faded, and even at times when the scientific work in question was worthy. Decades later, David McKay would be right in the middle of an eruption of hostilities over this genetic instinct within the agency.

Some of the most flamboyant cultural clashes around McKay involved the Apollo astronauts. From their vantage point on the hazardous front lines, the space fliers viewed the rearguard scientists, medical doctors, and their ilk in an even more negative light than did the general run of engineers. Many in the astronaut camp saw the scientific people as serious distractions from the risky business at hand: “Larry Lightbulbs” and “Mad Professors,” purveying “ding-a-ling stuff”—dangerous stuff, if your purpose was to conduct safe, successful operations in space and beat the enemy.

As they taught their rock lessons, McKay and the other geologists were forbidden to test the astronauts, or rate them, or do anything to trigger competition in the already hotly competitive ranks. The astronauts’ energy, alertness, and reputed supercompetence might have misled some geologists into assuming the spacemen would be quite willing and able to tackle what amounted to a college-level course for geology majors. But many astronauts considered the nerdy geology lectures big yawners. Many thought the planned fifty-eight hours of lecture time was way too much. Could someone please explain why moon explorers had to learn the formula for
turquoise
? And was it really reasonable to teach them how to use an aneroid barometer? It depended on
air pressure
!

But there were exceptions. One of the astronauts who impressed McKay and others by taking an active interest in rock school was the diligent Armstrong.

And the broader tensions would ease as time went on. One reason was the arrival of a peacemaker in the person of Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, one of the few scientists selected for astronaut training during Apollo. Armed with a Ph.D. in geology from Harvard, he also had a combination of personality and political acumen that enabled him to smooth tensions on both sides. He helped scale back the irritations inflicted by fellow scientists while encouraging fellow astronauts to be more appreciative of geology’s rewards.

In McKay’s view, in any case, the astronauts did most of their learning not in the classroom but on field trips. That was his favorite thing about the job. The “field” was where the rocks were. Rocks and soil meant data—a record preserved in minerals. These trips brought him a kind of happiness that went beyond getting away from the urban hum and beyond standing in some majestic slice of nature aware of your own breathing, feeling how the air moved, noticing how the clouds looked, hearing what the birds sounded like in that moment. You sensed the infinite history beneath this place and every place, the past that stretched deep into the well of time and was just waiting to be deciphered.

On these trips, McKay, a handful of other geologists, and a contingent of up to a couple dozen astronauts would go off to some exotic outback to paw over the indigenous geology. They traveled to Iceland, Hawaii, Alaska’s Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, and a variety of spots in the continental United States.

In the field, neophytes tended to pick out the most unusual, the prettiest, or the most striking specimens. McKay would explain to the attentive Armstrong and other “students” that what the geologists wanted was the most
common
type, something that was characteristic of the neighborhood. Averageness was the important thing. And yet, if a Martian had landed on Earth looking for representative samples of the dominant species, by that same standard this group of
Homo sapiens
would have had to be rejected. The space center had assembled one of the most atypical collections of specimens on the planet, engaged in the most esoteric pursuits imaginable: rocketeers, moon mapmakers, plotters of interplanetary trajectories, space colony habitat designers, developers of dehydrated ice cream and other delectables for dining in weightlessness, the coolest of death-defying pilots, and this motley clutch of rock detectives.

McKay was admitted to Mission Control for this first moon landing courtesy of the space center’s public affairs chief, who had met McKay on a field trip, gotten to know him, and asked for him personally, so the selection had not gone through the usual chain of command. The idea, apparently, was to make sure that, among all the technicians, flight controllers, capcoms (capsule communicators), management types, and pilots watching their screens in the terraced amphitheater and in the adjoining glassed-in VIP boxes, there was at least one person on hand who could explain to the press and the public any comments the astronauts might make about what they encountered on the lunar surface.

In his pockets, McKay carried old coins given to him by each of his grandfathers. One was a silver dollar from 1803, the other was a counterfeit half-dollar. He wanted some kind of bridge to his family’s past from this historic event.

To a degree that is almost incomprehensible today, much about the moon was a mystery to everybody at that time, including the “experts.” People had speculated that the moon’s surface might be like any of the following: cotton candy, honeycombs, Cracker Jacks, toothpicks, or tiddlywinks. The favored analogy was “fairy castles,” a loose reference to the sand structures found in home aquariums.

Despite lunar studies conducted by robotic craft, lingering uncertainties raised concerns about the Apollo missions’ safety. For example, was the moon powder so insubstantial that the lander would sink in and disappear? At least one prominent scientist argued the possibility.

The “unknown” that caused the most fear was the threat of deadly moon microbes. Might the astronauts pick up bugs lurking in the lunar soil and bring them home as a plague? Alien life-forms, along with nuclear mutants, had been populating science-fiction stories for some time. (The latest blockbuster on the theme,
The Andromeda Strain,
had just been published in May 1969.) And there was little hard information to indicate that such threats were not equally abundant in reality,
out there.
But most geologists were convinced that nothing could live on the moon. There was no air, probably no water (except possibly frozen in spots perpetually shaded from the sun), and there was constant bombardment by radiation and space debris. As one had observed, if you wanted to design a sterilizing machine, you could hardly do better than the surface of the moon.

Still, there was enough concern among citizens and governments around the world that NASA officials felt they had to take precautions against the remotest possibility that a moon germ could make it to Earth. Both the astronauts and the boxes of rocks and dirt they hauled back from the moon would be quarantined in the new Lunar Receiving Laboratory for about a three-week period beginning when they splashed down in the ocean.

During his two-hour-and-thirteen-minute sojourn out on the lunar landscape, Armstrong performed like an A student. He astounded McKay and other geologists back home with his cool and competent descriptions of what he saw, starting right after he took that first “small step” into the lunar dust: “Yes, the surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” He reported that some of the hard rock samples appeared to be (yes, he actually said it) phenocrysts. For the anxious geologists watching back on Earth, it was almost orgasmic.

By the time Armstrong and Aldrin climbed back into their spacecraft, they were covered with the sootlike moon dust. One respected scientist had theorized that the stuff would explode in a fiery conflagration when oxygen hit it. When the spacewalkers took off their helmets, they got their first whiff. They discovered that the moon, the lyrical silvery muse of poetry and legend, had the acrid odor of gunpowder or wet ash.

During the first post-moonwalk press conference, carried live, nationwide, on TV late that night, the geology questions were directed to a slightly nervous but excited David McKay, seated with several others onstage in the space center’s auditorium. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, an unabashed fan of the space program, asked McKay (by remote) to explain an astronaut’s comment that some of the lunar soil they had retrieved behaved as if it were “wet.” Why would the soil stick to the tools like that if it was not wet? McKay responded carefully that the soil was probably very fine grained and might have had electrostatic properties that made it clumpy, so that it
seemed
damp but was actually dry.

The ever-cautious McKay based his responses on the only information he had to go on—the pictures from the moon that he had seen that day, plus the astronauts’ descriptions. He would be relieved later when his speculation was confirmed. It was the first time he had been on TV as a scientist, and he enjoyed getting calls the next day from friends and relatives who’d seen his appearance, played over and over. Even though he was a decidedly junior member of the team, he felt confident that he could handle the geology questions as well as anybody. The cameras made him uncomfortable, though not paralyzingly so. This would still be true when he made his
second
appearance on a global stage—almost a quarter century later, because of work he would do a short walk northeast of his ringside seat in Mission Control, inside a building and a culture born of Apollo.

Less than a week after the first moonwalk, the first handpicked pieces of moon reached Earth. McKay watched on TV from Building 31 when five senior geologists in sterile white lab coats and caps, inside the new Lunar Receiving Laboratory nearby, inspected that first haul. The group had kept the rocks isolated inside a vacuum chamber. A technician, operating his own arms inside rubber arms attached to the chamber in order to prevent contamination, reached in and opened the first sealed aluminum rock box. It was a moment of monumental anticipation. The geologists were a pride of Galahads approaching the Grail.

Then they saw the contents. Apparently forgetting the audience watching on live TV, one of them—a Harvard researcher—blurted: “Holy shit! It looks like a bunch of burnt potatoes!”