Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing. The rock was far more brittle than he anticipated, and instead of cleaving in two it shattered. One of those shards flew away with so much force that it left behind a bloody gash in this forearm.
Neil Armstrong almost made a mistake. He had found an interesting rock sticking out of a formation. Curious to see what the rock was made of, he needed to examine its interior more closely. So he reached for his hammer and took a swing. The rock was far more brittle than he anticipated, and instead of cleaving in two it shattered. One of those shards flew away with so much force that it left behind a bloody gash in this forearm.
Thankfully, Neil’s miscalculation didn’t take place on the moon, but on a training exercise in Big Bend, Texas. He was learning how to be a geologist, not a fighter pilot or astronaut, and it’s a good thing he had expert guides with him, so that he wouldn’t make such a rookie mistake during an actual mission.
Early on NASA leaders like James Webb, the administrator during most of the 1960s, recognized that the Apollo missions had to also be science missions. This was a scientific opportunity unlike any other. The chance to get up close and personal, literally hands-on, with the moon itself.
But at the time, the idea that the Apollo missions should have a scientific component was not popular at all. NASA was a political tool. It was an administration tasked with a very specific set of purposes: to propel the United States into space, and, after Kennedy’s famous speech, to beat the Russians to the moon. And while science is a part of making that possible, it’s not the end goal.
So Webb and other leaders faced stiff resistance. The public and political leaders were not interested in spending vast sums of money on…a little science expedition (things haven’t improved much in the decades since). And even many scientists were opposed to it! They were worried that the absolute buckets of money being poured into Apollo would mean that moon science would take resources away from any other kind of science, especially planetary science, which was a field still in its infancy.
