Flying to the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

outside. We didn’t want that to happen anywhere near our electronic equipment, because the moisture might cause short circuits, which in turn would cause our radios to fail.
    Radio failure was especially worrisome, because if the astronauts couldn’t talk to anybody they would have to do all the navigating back from the moon, without help from radar tracking stations, and computers on earth. Navigation instruments were being designed, but no one really knew how accurate they would be, and they had to be very, very precise. For example, as it approaches the earth, a spacecraft returning from the moon must be within a very narrow
zone about forty miles high. If it misses this zone on the high side, it will skip the earth entirely and keep on going past; on the low side, it will hit the atmosphere at too steep an angle, and burn up. Hitting a forty-mile target from a distance of 238,000 miles is about like trying to split a human hair with a razor blade thrown from a distance of twenty feet.
    My gray desk began to fill up with papers and my shelves with books as I learned more and more about all these problems. In addition to reading on my own, I attended a school which had been arranged especially for us “new boys”—the third group of astronauts. I’m not fond of schools generally, but I thought this was a good one, for several reasons. First, there were no grades, and that is always nice. Second, it was only a few hours a day for a couple of months. And third, I figured this was the last school I would ever have to attend. We studied a number of subjects, some complicated and some simple. We studied astronomy, aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, meteorology, guidance and navigation, and digital computers—to name just a few. We also studied a lot of geology, which I didn’t expect. Geology is the study of the origin, history, and structure of the earth. Since the earth is made up mostly of rocks, geology is mostly the study of rocks. We didn’t have any moon rocks to study, so we studied earth rocks instead. The idea was that when and if we finally reached the moon we would have a much better idea of what to look for, and what kinds of rocks would be best to bring back.
    Houston in 1964 was an exciting if somewhat strange place. Granted, studying rocks wasn’t exactly thrilling, but
look where it might lead! A space walk? A moon walk? Who knew? Even if I never got to the moon, I was finally an ASTRONAUT*!!-WOW! Now I just had to get assigned to a space flight.

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    B efore I could fly in space, however, there were still a thousand things I had to learn. Some of them I could absorb by sitting in my little office in Houston, but others required trips to far-off places. For example, in our study of geology, we could go only so far by looking at rocks in a laboratory. Beyond that, we had to see those rocks in place, to appreciate how they had been formed. Craters on the moon can be caused either by the impact of meteorites or by volcanic action. To recognize the differences between the two, we studied an impact crater in Arizona and volcanoes in Hawaii. We visited other unusual rock formations in Oregon, New Mexico, and Texas—and
even spent one night at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
    The Grand Canyon trip was the first geology trip I took, and it was also the most impressive. The Canyon has been created by the Colorado River flowing through the Arizona desert and digging an ever deepening trench, which is now nearly a mile deep and many miles across. As you walk down a narrow pathway that zigzags back and forth, you can see the history of the region in the various layers of rocks. The young rocks are on top, but as the river digs deeper, it exposes older and older layers. The age of some rocks at the bottom of the Canyon has been estimated at over two billion years. Not million, but billion. That is nearly half as old as we believe our solar system to be. The trees and plants also