Explorers

In February 2010 the Explorers learned about the early days of the United States manned space program and the motivations and efforts that led to the moon landings.

The group started by viewing a video during a normal after-school meeting. The show was an episode of a mini-series called “From the Earth to the Moon.” The episode we watched, “Galileo Was Right,” focuses on the Apollo 15 mission, specifically on the geology training the crew received to maximize the science return of the mission.

Apollo 15 is widely regarded as one of the high points of the program from a scientific perspective, and its success was largely due to this geology training. The video does an excellent job of showing how the astronauts learned to recognize and describe for the scientists back on Earth what they were seeing and finding, as they put into practice the field instruction they received from Professor Lee Silver.

Apollo 15 landed in the Apennine Mountains of the moon near a large crevice known as Hadley Rille. In this area mission commander Dave Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin made a number of explorations from their lunar module Falcon, while command module pilot Al Worden made observations of his own while orbiting overhead in the command module Endeavour.

During one of their times outside the Falcon, Scott and Irwin found a rock that at the time was the oldest piece of the moon ever recovered. A chunk of anorthosite that was named the “Genesis Rock,” it was eventually dated at about 4.5 billion years old, almost as old as the solar system itself.

The Explorers followed up this video a couple of days later with a field trip of their own, visiting the National Museum of the Air Force. Here among the multitudes of planes and other aircraft are some spacecraft as well. The group discussed how the space program developed to a large degree as a response to the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, and the launch of the first human into space, both accomplishments of the Soviet Union. In May 1961 President John F. Kennedy challenged America to fulfill the goal of landing a human on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth before the end of the 1960s.

The group looked first at a capsule from the Mercury program, which started our country’s manned space efforts by launching a single astronaut at a time. Next we moved on to a Gemini capsule, which launched a pair of astronauts on each mission. Mr. Ramsey explained how Gemini built on the Mercury efforts: while a Mercury astronaut had very limited control over his capsule (being able to turn it in all directions, but not really being able to change its orbit or maneuver it to a different place from where its rocket had headed it), Gemini had several goals that were instrumental to the effort to land on the moon. First was demonstrating that a spacecraft could change its heading and direction and orbit. Second was to show that astronauts could get outside the capsule and conduct meaningful work in space while in their own spacesuit. Next, the concept of rendezvous needed to be proven, meaning that two spacecraft in different orbits could adjust and meet up with each other. The final goal was docking, or the direct linking of two spacecraft. Gemini accomplished all of these objectives.

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The Mercury and Gemini capsules at the museum are both examples of craft that never flew—they were built to mission specifications, but were never used on an actual mission. The next featured attraction, however, did fly in space, and indeed went all the way to the moon and back. This was the Apollo 15 command module Endeavour that was featured in the film the club watched. Astronauts Scott, Irwin, and Worden were all members of the U.S. Air Force, so it is only appropriate that the command module from their mission should be preserved at the Air Force Museum. Contemplating how far this craft traveled, and how fast it was moving especially when it returned to Earth, was one of the highlights of the museum visit.

The club also saw a moon rock (brought back by Apollo 16) and a Titan missile, essentially the same as the Titan rockets that launched the Gemini missions. The members imagined what it would have been like to ride one of the country’s rockets into space, and how it might feel to return to Earth with only a thin heat shield protecting you from burning up on your reentry into the atmosphere. The group also discussed a few more, ahem, delicate issues relating to spaceflight—namely, how one uses the potty up there, and what happens when an astronaut suffers from space sickness.

The group followed up the tour of the museum’s spacecraft with a short discussion of the Genesis Rock and its meaning, particularly the mind-boggling vastness of its age. With an imaginary timeline activity, the group found that if a human life of 83 years is represented by a single inch, so that one foot is the same as 1,000 years, a million years becomes over three football fields (333 yards or 1,000 feet). On this scale, “walking back” to the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction requires over 12 miles in order to get back to 65 million years ago. Even this incredible stretch of time is dwarfed, however, by the age of the Genesis Rock. At 4.5 billion years old, reaching its birth on our scale of one foot=one thousand years requires us to travel over 850 miles. Contemplating this, the club members understood why astronaut Dave Scott has said that finding this rock was probably the most significant accomplishment of his life.

The Explorers then spent a few minutes checking out the rest of the museum with their parents, then some of them headed home while others gathered at the museum’s IMAX theater. There, they watched Space Station, which brought more recent activities of the space program to life on a huge screen.

To see a few photos of our visit to the museum, check out the Gallery.

To find out more about some of the topics the Explorers investigated, click on the links below.

The Apollo Program

Apollo 15

National Museum of the Air Force

“From the Earth to the Moon” Mini-Series

Anorthosite

NASA Home Page