Astronauts didn’t need to be there for these tests, and when we weren’t available, the engineers and technicians did it themselves. But I believe our presence had a tremendous psychological impact on the Downey workers. We made it our business to know all the technicians who worked on our spacecraft and implored them to tell us if they came across any problems. Over time we developed a great rapport, and eventually, when I walked in each morning, they gave me little hints about something I might want to take a look at, which we could then fix together. Working as a team, we caught things that might otherwise have caused an issue during flight.
Fortunately, we were not stuck doing spacecraft testing week after week. We planned to explore the moon, so we needed to know something about where we were going, which meant we had to become experts in geology. Dave Scott felt that the Apollo spacecraft engineering would be pretty tried and tested by the time we flew, so now we could devote more formal training time to science. We would not be test pilots this time: we would push the technology to its maximum potential.
Geology was far removed from test piloting. Yet we weren’t starting from scratch; we’d been studying the subject since joining NASA. We began primarily in the classroom and over time probably earned the equivalent of a geology college degree. I have to say, however, that the classroom work was as dry as dust, and I had a hard time keeping up with it.
We cataloged rocks in those classes and learned to recognize varying types, such as the differences between volcanic and sedimentary rocks, and how they came to be in the places where they were found. I learned that to be a true geologist, it was not enough to simply memorize what different examples looked like on sight. To really understand them and learn their secrets, we needed to get samples under a microscope and study them in greater detail. I found that the stories those samples told could be dramatically different. The rocks could have been hurled out of volcanoes, exposed and worn by erosion, folded by tectonic forces, or laid down at the bottom of a lake—there were thousands of intricate possibilities.
We wouldn’t have the luxury of microscopes on the moon, however, so we never fully studied all of the diverse peculiarities that true geologists find. Instead, our crew would identify lunar rocks by eye and examine large lunar features based on what we could see and photograph from lunar orbit. The rock samples could be analyzed by trained geologists once we returned from our mission. We’d have to choose good examples for them.
The dry training style our teachers used in the classroom never really gripped me, but my attention picked up when we started to make geology field trips. To be out in the wild landscape made a huge difference. We hadn’t been out of the classroom much in our first year at NASA, but now, instead of learning on a micro-level in the classroom, we studied huge expanses of terrain. I loved the feeling of being out in the field and so, it turned out, did my two Apollo crewmates.
We’d head to parts of the Rocky Mountains and survey the dramatic landscape. I would find sedimentary rocks on slopes, then hike across valleys and find the same type of rock on another slope, many miles away. From this exercise, I could understand that these rocks had been formed next to each other in flat, watery environments, and then volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or tectonic plate movement had thrust them up and away from each other. By looking at the rocks and the landscape, we could reconstruct what had happened as if the landscape were some giant, complex puzzle. Fieldwork was frequently hard work, both physically and mentally, but it was fascinating. Soon I could not only identify rock types on sight, but also explain the processes of their formation, and why they ended up where we found them. I could have happily pursued a career in field geology as readily as piloting.
The geologists who taught us were trying to prepare us to study the moon. The irony was that many of them disagreed profoundly about how the moon’s features were formed. For every geologist who said the moon’s craters were mostly formed by volcanoes, there was another who believed they were created by meteor impact. Being trained by experts who disagreed made our field trips even more interesting, and it caused me to have an open mind about what I might see when I did get up there. We would sit around the campfire in the evenings on our field trips, astronauts and geologists trading theories back and forth.
Our campfire conversations were greatly enlivened by vodka. We started a tradition of always taking a bottle or two on these trips, and our favorite was a Mexican brand called Oso Negro. It was very good—so much so, that as our flight grew closer, we joked about trying to smuggle a bottle aboard.
Listening to all the big questions the geologists traded around the campfire, I hoped that when I flew I’d be able to give them some answers. To do so, I needed to know what to look for. On these trips, I learned that when a volcano erupts the process is nothing like a meteor impact. So different, in fact, that it should be evident when studying a crater up close. When a volcano erupts, new material is blasted out on top of the landscape, so new rock is on top of old. With a meteor impact, the surface is blown upward and outward, folding the lower layers of ground on top of the upper ones, so old rock is on top of new. I was looking forward to trying to identify these features from low lunar orbit, while my colleagues did an even closer study on the moon’s surface.
We traveled all over the world to study as many moon-like geologic regions as we could. I spent around ten days exploring the volcanically active regions of Iceland, a place so stark and barren I felt as if I were already on the moon. Natural hot springs, warmed by underground lava, dotted the landscape. We had a wonderful time studying the rock formations, the volcanic fields, and the general topography of the island. It was a bizarre place; we were there in the summertime, and it seemed like the sun never set. You could be out at 3 a.m. and see people strolling the city streets, the stores still open.
All of us in the NASA training team assembled to have group pictures taken with the country’s prime minister. Since we were training out in the field, he flew in especially by helicopter for the photos; the country was very proud to have us there. After what seemed like dozens of photos taken, we were about to finish when one of our guys called out to stop. He had noticed that the photographer forgot to take the lens cover off his camera. We all had a good laugh about it and then retook the pictures. I’m glad we spotted the problem, otherwise there would have been one annoyed government leader—and a photographer out of a job.
NASA also sent us to explore Alaska, home to valleys of fumaroles that steamed scalding gases into the cold air. Our planet is a living, changing, dynamic place, and learning this amazed me. We also tried to have a little fun. Brooks River was a favorite spot to enjoy the state’s outstanding natural beauty. We were there in the salmon-spawning season, with fish so thick that it looked like we could walk across the river on their backs.
But we were not the only salmon hunters there. Dozens of brown bears were in the river gorging themselves. They were not afraid of people; in fact, one night we had a bear come by, stand up straight, and clean his claws on the roof of our cabin. His front claws must have been thirteen feet off the ground. We treated the bears with a great deal of respect.
We decided to head upstream away from the bears, where there were trout. We found a natural log dam about a quarter of a mile from our camp, and my old officemate PJ Weitz wandered up there as often as he could, wearing enormous hip waders and carrying his fly rod. He was fishing alone on a gravel bar in the middle of the river one day and noticed the water was deeper in front of him, so he began to walk backward to remain in the shallower water. He thought he heard a grunt behind him. Turning around, he found himself twenty feet away from a huge brown bear. Remembering his father’s advice about what to do if you encounter a bear in the woods, PJ waved his arms and yelled, trying to scare it off. The beast responded by making a threatening, throaty roar back at him. Evidently it wasn’t scared.