...naturally I want to prove him wrong rather than just tell him he is.
The following from a 1970 book might be useful. It's closer to the source time-wise, well before memories could become faded and muddled. I'll include all the text of pages 171 to 174. The part you'll want starts at the last paragraph on page 171 and ends at the second paragraph on page 174. Will also include the end notes, 5-8.
"First on the Moon - A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr", written with Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin, epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke. Michael Joseph Ltd, London (1970), pages 171-174.
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improved versions, including one at MSC, Houston.] You had the feeling of being able to jump very high — a very light feeling. You also had a feeling that things were happening slowly, which indeed they were. It was a sort of floating sensation. But the lunar setting will become a very easy place to work, I think, once we have mastered the problems of balance and starting and stopping. We'll adapt to it. We'll be able to lift large loads — one hundred pounds with one hand, for instance — very easily. It's our feeling that the first time we step out on the lunar surface will not be the time to try to develop a technique concerning how much area we can cover or how far we can reasonably go. It will be a kind of dress rehearsal. There's no way we can simulate all the aspects together. There's no way to do that until we get to the moon. But we can take all the different parts and do them one piece at a time.
Then, mentally, we can put them all together and comprehend what the actual problems are going to be. It's like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle. >>
HOUSTON (McCandless): Eleven, this is Houston. You are go for LOI. Over.
ALDRIN: Roger, go for LOI.
HOUSTON (McCandless): And we're showing about ten minutes and thirty seconds to LOS. I would like to remind you to enable the BD roll on the auto RCS switches.
ALDRIN: Roger, and confirm you want PCM low going over the hill. Over.
HOUSTON (McCandless): That's affirmative, eleven... I'll give you a MARK at thirteen minutes and thirty seconds to ignition.
ARMSTRONG: Okay, and then a GET, please.
HOUSTON (McCandless): Stand by a minute... I'll give you a time hack on the GET at 75 hours 37 minutes and I'll show you a bias at about a second and a half to allow for the time of flight... Stand by. <GET 75:37> MARK, 75 hours 37 minutes GET... Stand by for a MARK at TIG minus twelve. MARK TIG minus twelve.
COLLINS: You were right on, Bruce. Thank you.
<GET 75:38>
Three minutes away from loss of signal, 425 nautical miles from the moon, velocity 7,368 feet per second, just over five thousand statute mph...
In the history of Apollo, as in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, there had been "A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance... The fifth verse had special relevance to the mission of Apollo 11: "A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together...” Geologists saw the mission of Apollo 11 as "a time to gather stones together" — one hundred twenty-seven scientific laboratories from all over the world had been selected to receive samples of the "moon rocks" which Armstrong and Aldrin were to scoop off the lunar surface and bring back to earth. [5] The
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rocks could tell a lot or could tell nothing; but the betting was that the rocks could tell the geologists something. A Minnesota-born Chippewa Indian named Arnold Brokaw was convinced that they would. Out at Flagstaff, Arizona, during the eighteen months preceding the flight of Apollo 11, he had been chief of the surface planetary exploration branch of the United States Geological Survey's Center of Astrogeology. There might or might not be latent water on the moon, but rocks — with their meaningful "bathtub rings" — were certainly there.
By 1968 Brokaw and his colleagues at Flagstaff had a good deal to go on. Five lunar Orbiters had circled the moon and photographed it, and four Surveyors had successfully landed on the moon. There were literally thousands of photographs to examine. The geologists' favorite, one they often called "the picture of the century," was a low-angle photograph of the lunar crater Copernicus, taken by lunar Orbiter 2. For the first time men had a good, clear look across the lunar surface, not up toward it, and the geologists calculated and noted that the crater walls of Copernicus rose nearly ten thousand feet — almost twice the height of the walls of the Grand Canyon. There was also a good photograph of a prime landing site in the southwestern part of the Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis), the contours of which bore a striking resemblance to an enormous area near Flagstaff known as the San Francisco volcanic field. Almost as flat as the moon's maria, covered with cinder cones, lava flows and volcanic ash, the field was formed in the eleventh century by one of the last violent volcanic eruptions on the North American continent. A mountain in what is now called the San Francisco Peaks group, in north central Arizona, blew up and emitted fiery globs of lava, cinders, ashes and smoking stone, most of which — because of the prevailing westerlies — fell to the northeast. When it was all over a cinder cone one thousand feet high had been formed, surrounded by miles of volcanic trash; the place came to be called Sunset Crater because the cone had a reddish complexion at its peak. As an American Indian, Arnold Brokaw felt a special sympathy for the Sinagua ("Without Water") Indians who had been farming this barren area for about five hundred years when the mountain exploded, and who then fled — those who had time. [6] Brokaw also felt that this volcanic area had a practical relevance to the Apollo mission: it was impossible to identify and select rocks on the lunar surface without going there, but men could practice for it if they could create a truly realistic moonscape on earth.
It had to be done with explosive charges. "We began with the Orbiter photo," Brokaw said, "and scaled off all its craters and features and put them all onto a map. We went out into Cinder Lake, which forms part of the volcanic field, and staked out the center point of all the craters, in the exact relationship they were to each other in the Orbiter photo. Then we calculated the amount of explosive it would take to get the moonscape we
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wanted. There were three distinct ages of craters shown on Orbiter. It is fairly easy to determine this even from a distant photograph because of the overlapping of ejecta that comes out of the craters. It's as if you threw a shovelful of dirt on this piece of ground; it spreads out a little bit. Then you throw another shovelful on top of this, and you get the age relationships." Furthermore, there was plenty of evidence from the Surveyor pictures that one did not just sink into the moon's fine-grained maria — at least not very far. Brokaw calculated, "There's bedrock down there. So on our cinder field we went through the upper layer of cinders, down to a layer of lakebed material, and finally down to a hard basalt layer. We dug all our holes and that was quite a job, getting them to exact depth to create a properly sized crater. We used carbon nitrate as an explosive, planted all three 'generations' of craters, hooked up the 'fuse' — miles of a sort of yellow tape, really — and blew."
When the three sets of charges were fired, one after the other, Cinder Lake shook the way Cape Kennedy seems to shake at the time of a Saturn V launch. When the echoes had stopped ricocheting off the far sides of the San Francisco Peaks, even the men who had organized the project looked at each other with some awe. "The resemblance to moon craters was remarkable," Brokaw said. "We measured our diameters against the diameters on the Orbiter photo, and we had an error of less than two percent. We had a simulated prime lunar landing area with three generations of craters, rays coming out from them, double-ring craters, blocky rim craters, everything."
Alas, the Apollo 11 astronauts never walked on Flagstaff's lunar surface. [7] This was not because Mike Collins hated rocks; the relentless pressure of flight simulations, meetings and flight plan changes kept the crew from traveling to Arizona. It was not a critical omission, because Brokaw had crews of trained geologists in space suits who roamed over the man-made crater field, trying out the complicated tools the astronauts would have to use on the moon and practicing "traverses," or walks across the field, describing features as they went. They even built a flimsy "lunar module" out of steel tubing and canvas (for a paltry six hundred dollars) and parked it on the moonscape so men could practice observation and geological identification from the limited viewing field and particular height of the LM windows; they experimented with cameras to determine which types would be both practical for astronauts wearing heavy gloves and most productive of photographs which would be used to reconstruct the geological history of the actual lunar handing site. All this information was relayed to the Apollo 11 astronauts by way of the team's principal investigator, Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, [8] and astronaut-geologist Jack Schmitt. Brokaw had come to think of his branch as a kind of fifty-man backup team: "The astronaut himself is, to us, like a sensor. He's there, and we're down here. He can't he a fully trained geologist; he's got five thousand things to do. But when it comes time to help him with his
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EVA we want to be able to feed him any information he needs, offer any advice, support. We have to be ready."
By the time Apollo 11 was due to fly Brokaw had come to think that photographs taken on the moon would be at least as important as the rocks Armstrong and Aldrin brought back: "What is important to us is how the rock got where it was, how and where it lay, how it relates to other things in the same region. We can determine a lot about its mineralogy just from photographs." He spent an hour with Neil Armstrong emphasizing the importance of photography. And as he left the Armstrong home, he made a seemingly irrelevant but strangely prophetic remark: "It doesn't matter if the guy knows where he landed on the moon; we can figure that out later..."
<GET 75:39>
HOUSTON (McCandless): Two minutes to LOS... Apollo 11, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good going around the corner and we'll see you on the other side. Over.
ARMSTRONG: Roger. Everything looks okay up here.
HOUSTON (McCandless): Roger, out.
<GET 75:41>
HOUSTON (PAO Jack Riley): And we've had loss of signal as Apollo 11 goes behind the moon. We were showing a distance to the moon of 309 nautical miles at LOS, velocity 7,664 feet per second [5,225.3 statute mph]. Weight was 96,012 pounds. We're 7 minutes 45 seconds away from the LOI No. 1 burn, which will take place behind the moon out of communications. Here in the control center two members of the backup crew, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell, have joined Bruce McCandless at the CAPCOM console. Fred Haise, the third member of the backup crew, has just come in, too, and Deke Slayton, director of Flight Crew Operations, is at that console. The viewing room is filling up. Among those we noticed on the front row in the viewing room are astronauts Tom Stafford, John Glenn, Gene Cernan, Dave Scott, Al Worden and Jack Swigert. With a good lunar orbit insertion burn the Madrid station should acquire Apollo 11 at 76 hours 15 minutes 29 seconds. Acquisition time for no burn, 76 hours 5 minutes 30 seconds.
They were around the comer now, and over the hill...
...And out of sight and out of communication. Within the next seven minutes the three men on Apollo 11 had to decide whether to allow themselves to be "captured" by lunar gravity — or take the slingshot and come home. This was an important decision for each man on the crew. Each had had his frustrations and his disappointments; each, in his own way, had a kind of private score to settle with space. Neil Armstrong perhaps had the most to settle; despite the apparent ordinariness of his Ohio upbringing, his subsequent life had been a mix of high risk and mishap, even tragedy (with the death of the Armstrongs' daughter Karen). There was that night in 1964 when the house had burned down in Texas... and Jan Armstrong remem-
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End notes, pages 430-431
5. The Soviet Union did not request rock samples, presumably because this request would have set a precedent for a reciprocal request from the United States. British geologists were allotted the greatest share—2.3 percent of the total earth weight of 25 kilograms.
6. Roderick Peattie, The Inverted Mountains (New York, Vanguard, 1948),pp. 57-60, 120-121. John McGregor, Southwestern Archaeology (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 295-302, 381-382, 419-421, 475. Joseph Miller, Arizona (New York, Hastings House, 1966), p. 286. National Park Service—Southwestern Monuments Association, publication number 6-66-20M, 9th edition. U.S. Department of the Interior, 1968, 306-123/119. National Park Service—Southwestern Monuments Association, publication number 5-68-20M, 9th edition. When the lava cooled, the Indians came back and for more than a century this area was a mixture of Indian culture — Pueblos from the northeast, Hohokam irrigation farmers from central Arizona, Mogollon groups from the south, Cohoninos from the west. A severe drought which began in 1215 drove them all out for good by 1225. When the Spanish came through the region between 1583 and 1605 they encountered small bands of Indians in the mountains near Flagstaff. These probably were hunting and gathering parties of either Havasupais from the Grand Canyon or Yavapais from the Verde Valley. No Indians were reported between the Hopi villages and the San Francisco mountains. The Navajo, who are seen in the national monument area today, did not move into the region until about 1870.
7. Armstrong and Aldrin were due to go to Flagstaff that day in May 1969; at the last minute they had to cancel out, and the resident astrogeologists went through a scheduled exercise without them. Just before noon, hunched over a plotting board at Astrogeology's own "mission control" in downtown Flagstaff, Arnold Brokaw saw a closed-circuit television picture go dead. After a moment a hand-lettered sign appeared on the screen. Someone had drawn an impressive bolt of lightning and the single word: BLAM! A violent storm had sent the geologists scurrying to the shelter of their vans. A voice crackled over the radio from the field: "It's just as well the astronauts didn't come!" Dora Jane Hamblin, reporting from Flagstaff, 1969.
8. Dr. Shoemaker, chairman of the California Institute of Technology's Division of Geological Sciences, thought the scientific thrust of Apollo inadequate and after the flight of Apollo 11 indicated his intention to leave the program after the third moon landing in 1970. UPI dispatch, October 9, 1969.
A few weeks ago, using the above info, I poked around to the northeast of Flagstaff in Google Earth, but it's a large area and I didn't know exactly where to look for the crater field. This PDF I found tonight:
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/lunar_exploration/CinderLakesCraterField.pdfhas good maps of the locality, but it's too late for me to look now (after 3am), so it would be great if anyone else can find the latitudes and longitudes of the sites so we can all take a look.
