Meteor Crater: Training Apollo's first lunar scientists
Eugene Shoemaker and other geologists played a key role in the Apollo program, teaching astronauts to read the lunar surface using the rock playgrounds of Northern Arizona.
Geologist Gene Shoemaker dreamed of going to the Moon well before the space race popularized the idea in the early 1960s. He coined the term astrogeology while studying the Moon from afar, in preparation for someday visiting. By the time his dream started feeling like reality, a surprise medical diagnosis disqualified him from astronaut service in 1963. Shoemaker would still go on to become one of the most influential scientists in the space program, and to create the USGS Branch of Astrogeology. Here, Shoemaker demonstrates an early space suit prototype in April 1964 at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He poses, of course, as if he were sampling rocks.
Eugene Shoemaker and his team also led geology field trips for astronauts-in-training in 1967. The goal was to teach them to recognize the features of craters made by both volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts. At that time, there was still debate between scientists about how the Moon got its craters. But Shoemaker was the expert — in fact, the origins of what’s now known as Meteor Crater in Arizona had been uncertain before his Ph.D. dissertation settled the matter.
During the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, Shoemaker and others from Flagstaff were there in the Science Support Room in the Houston Mission Control Center. In the weeks following the first moonwalk, their studies of lunar rock samples collected by Armstrong and Aldrin resulted in what would be the first of many breakthroughs in astrogeology — the geology of planetary bodies beyond earth.
As the Branch of Astrogeology gained momentum in 1963, its staff moved the headquarters from Menlo Park, California, to Flagstaff, Arizona. The town had an established observatory and was near what many scientists considered Moon-like geological features, such as areas shaped by cratering and volcanism. This allowed the geologists working on Apollo — the Manned Lunar Exploration team — to use the nearby craters and rocky landscapes to test methods and equipment in the years leading up to the spaceflights. The first space suit field test took place in June 1964, using an early Gemini suit borrowed from NASA. Here, support staff prepare to send an unidentified suited test subject (thought to be Shoemaker, Phillippi, or Harbour) onto the Moon-like terrain at the Bonito Lava Flow in Sunset Crater National Monument, not too far from Meteor Crater.
Here, USGS’s Gordon Swann is working with a prototype of the Apollo Lunar Staff and tool carrier in 1965. Around this same time, the USGS team figured out a way to actually be able to communicate, in real time, with the astronauts on the Moon. But when they pitched their idea for a Command Data Reception and Analysis facility to NASA, their aeronautical colleagues didn’t take kindly to the idea that a bunch of geologists would be “commanding” anything. In the end, the scientists were able to explain their goal was to be available to assist the astronauts during their lunar expeditions, and NASA agreed. The Flagstaff communications room was renamed the Apollo Data Facility.
Joe O’Connor tests out a TV camera on another “Lunar Staff” prototype. On the right is Kenna Edmonds, the USGS Astrogeology team’s time-and-motion specialist. Edmond’s role highlights another aspect of the mission the USGS team had to plan out precisely — how long it would take an astronaut to get around an area and complete certain tasks.
By 1965, the Gemini suit had given way to a prototype Apollo suit that was much easier to maneuver in. The team continued to rehearse its plans for the upcoming Moon mission in loaner suits from NASA, allowing them to specially design and build equipment that astronauts could use on the Moon. Here, USGS scientist Joe O’Connor dons a cowboy hat and space suit during an Apollo Extension Test sometime between September 20 and October 1, 1965, at a site — a dike within the Hopi Buttes Volcanic Field in the territory of the Navajo Nation — that scientists referred to as Apollo Mesa.
