"We're go. Same type. We're go."
I do remember the Apollo 11 landing. I am one of these people blessed with a few
very early memories of which this is one, and I remember sitting in our
living room and watching our black-and-white television with my parents
and my brothers and —
"Tranquility base here — the eagle has landed."
I do think that was a moment that changed everything forever.
And then for the rest of my life, we've been on the moon.
I was 4 years old in the summer of 1969 and the Apollo 11 landing
was late at night. My parents apparently woke me up and
plopped me down in front of the TV like everybody else around the world, at that time.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Mark Robinson: Well, that was a long time ago. Fifty years. Imagine that, right?
It was spellbinding, right? I was sitting there watching humans climb down the ladder
to step on the moon.
And you know, when you are 10 years old you don't really understand the
historical significance of it at all.
It's just the excitement of the moment, and it was really quite amazing.
And, you know, it obviously somehow shaped my whole career,
but that made a lasting impression on me and it wasn't just Apollo 11,
it was all the Apollo missions.
"How is the quality of the TV?"
"Oh, it's beatiful Mike, really is."
Elkins-Tanton: I am certain that there is so much still to discover on the surface of the moon.
We feel like we know it because we look at it every night.
ASU has a big space program, but it all started with the meteorites.
And I brought Ron Greeley, and he brought (Phil) Christensen.
Carleton Moore was actually director of the center for many, many years.
He was one of the first people to actually go to Houston,
pick up these moon samples that were brought back and bring them back
to our laboratories here at Arizona State and analyze them.
Moore: ASU got over 200 lunar samples before any of the other schools in the
state got any.
Wadhwa: It completely changed our view of how the moon formed — its origin;
that all came from analyzing these lunar samples.
"We've got a good bit of the ground mass —
in the bulk sample, plus a sizeable number of
selected rock fragments of different types."
Robinson: In a very brief period of time, Neil picked up rocks, filled the box up and then he
looked at the box and he thought, "You know, that looks kind of empty; there's all these
places between the rocks."
So he thought, "Oh, I bet you the geologists would want to have some of this soil."
He picked up the scoop and he very carefully filled in all the interstices
between the rocks.
The very first samples that were brought back by Neil Armstrong — actually
scientists found these specks of white mineral called "plagioclase" in them.
And just based on the presence of this white mineral,
scientists proposed that in fact there was a lunar magma ocean.
So there was an ocean of lava on the surface of the moon
some time in the past.
As it turns out, that soil was some of the most valuable samples
and we learned the most about the moon — not including all the rest of the missions, right? —
from the soil samples themselves.
Bell: An unanticipated part of winning the race to the moon was figuring
out where the moon came from and the origin of the Earth-moon
system and all this sort of fundamental planetary science and earth science
work that came out of Apollo.
To my mind's eye, you know, just personally, it was sending humans to another world.
And it's kind of shocking to me that we stopped going to the moon.
Bell: Once Apollo 11 landed successfully, the guys scooped up some rocks and soils,
quickly spent a very small amount of time on the lunar surface, got back
in the LEM and blasted off and rendezvoused and came back,
you know, that was a win. That was, you know, America has won
the race to the moon.
I would go to the moon. Given the opportunity, in a flash, right?
Kind of weird, I don't want to just loop around, lower earth orbit,
not interested.
But I would love to go to the moon.
And then I would love to come home.
I want to be a tourist about it. Because Earth is my favorite planet.
Elkins-Tanton: Being there on the ground with our human eyes, we're going to learn so many things
that we never learned before,
and so, it's time we go back.