Meet the man who taught the Apollo crews what to look for on the Moon.
NASA began as an organization dedicated to getting into space, not to studying it. NASA’s first satellites were scientific instruments, of course, as were the probes the U.S. flew past Venus and Mars, but the number-one American goal in running the space race was making sure we didn’t let the Soviets get an upper hand above the atmosphere — anything they might use to spread gulags across Europe or North America.
NASA’s number-two goal was doing something remarkable for the sake of doing something remarkable. Petrarch was, famously, the first man in history to climb a mountain just for the view; mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Everest, and answered, “Because it’s there.” President Kennedy summed up this attitude when he told Congress that the nation should commit itself to landing a man on the Moon, because, “while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.”
Science came in third. Not a distant third — NASA was run by exceptionally bright and serious men — but goals one and two required that they make their priority getting astronauts into space, and getting them back alive. Science was squeezed in when possible.
By 1965, NASA had 28 astronauts, all military or ex-military pilots. In a nod to science — which American scientists felt NASA was neglecting — it hired six more astronauts: three physicists, two MDs, and a geologist. The geologist was Harrison Schmitt. National Review readers may recognize the name — from 1977 to 1983, Schmitt was a Republican senator from New Mexico.
But long before he went into politics, he was NASA’s only geologist-astronaut. Geology was part of every astronaut’s training, but only in an uninspiring, perfunctory way. Schmitt knew it would be absurd for astronauts to arrive on the Moon and not understand what they were looking at. The lunar astronauts needed to take geology seriously; what they needed, Schmitt decided, was a really good teacher.
Schmitt picked out Leon Silver, a prominent CalTech geologist with whom Schmitt had studied as an undergrad. Silver was the sort of magnetic teacher each of us fondly remembers having had at one time or another; Schmitt thought he was just the man who could suck the pilot-astronauts into a world of stones and dirt.
Schmitt arranged for Silver to meet the crew of Apollo 13 for coffee. Silver persuaded the astronauts to spend some of their hard-won vacation days on a trip into the desert. Jim Lovell, Apollo 13’s commander, agreed — hesitantly. The trip would be a one-time deal; he wasn’t convinced they’d get anything out of it.
Silver drove them out into the Orocopia mountains, in the Sonoran Desert. Silver and his astronauts trudged out into the middle of nowhere, in 100-degree heat. Silver positioned the astronauts on a hill, and told them to imagine they’d just landed on the Moon: “Look out the window of the lunar module and describe what you see.”
What they saw was a big pile of rocks. Nondescript mountains and hills. Nothing in particular. “Silver listened,” wrote historian Andrew Chaikin; “then he coaxed them: what about the layers in that mountainside? What about the texture of that rock — how would you describe that?”
The astronauts got the picture very quickly: They were about to fly 250,000 miles to the Moon, only to draw a blank when they got there. Silver and his new students spent the next eight days in the desert, unshaved and unshowered, studying geology from dawn till dusk. The astronauts went back to NASA as evangelists.
The astronauts who went to the Moon knew they weren’t just looking for rocks, they were looking for clues to the Moon’s history.
Silver’s geology field trips became standard. The astronauts who went to the Moon knew they weren’t just looking for rocks, they were looking for clues to the Moon’s history and, by extension, the history of the Earth, of the solar system, and of all creation. They would keep their eyes open for collapsed lava tubes and dead volcanoes. They would examine impact craters of the sort that vanish on the geologically active Earth, but are preserved forever on the geologically dead Moon. They weren’t just looking for rocks — they were looking for specific minerals that could settle arguments about the Moon’s birth. Silver told them to keep their eyes open for anorthosite, distinguished by telltale white plagioclase crystals. Anorthosite, said Silver, would probably be scarce on the Moon — but it was what many geologists suspected the Moon’s original crust had been made of. Finding a piece of it would be a triumph for the Apollo missions, and for science.
And Silver was in Mission Control when one of his best students, astronaut Dave Scott, radioed to Houston: “Oh man! Guess what we just found! Guess what we just found! I think we found what we came for!”
What he’d found was the piece of anorthosite that’s now known as the “Genesis Rock.” The solar system is 4.5 billion years old; the Genesis Rock is just 100 million years younger. Planetary science had been revolutionized.
(In fact, 45 years later, the Genesis Rock is still making waves. In 2013, researchers at the University of Michigan discovered it contained traces of water, casting doubt on the dominant theories of the Moon’s formation.)
NASA has been in the news a lot lately; we’ve finally gotten a close look at Pluto. After the triumph of Apollo’s lunar exploration, planetary science became one of NASA’s dominant focuses. The New Horizons mission to Pluto would not have happened without Lee Silver’s foundational work. As New Horizons’ remarkable photos of Pluto have been beamed back to Earth, the New Horizons team has been giving some of Pluto’s geological features names. Mountain chains have been named for Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first men to climb Everest. An icy expanse was named for Sputnik, a dark patch was named for H. P. Lovecraft’s monster-god Cthulhu, and — very suitably — Pluto’s “heart” was named for Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.
Dr. Silver is not well known outside his field. Certainly, he’s not as well known as he should be — everyone who’s interested in space science or exploration is indebted to him. He turned 90 this year; an appropriate birthday present would be naming part of Pluto for him.
Write your congressman.
— Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This piece would not have been possible without the research of Andrew Chaikin, the foremost man of space history.