William Hartmann

I came in ’61, when LPL was located in the Physics, Math, and Meteorology Building, PMM. A group of us were located not in PMM but in a Quonset hut called T6, for Temporary Building Number 6. It was a sort of cylindrical shaped structure, on the present location of the science library. We used to have jokes about Kuiper flying into a tizzy over something and saying “Call T6, call T6,” because a bunch of us graduate students over there were either about to be chewed out or he needed us to do something.

Ewen Whitaker

We started up in very humble surroundings. We had one Quonset hut where the Science Library is now. We started up in this little hut and we set ourselves up there. But at the same time the new Physics and Atmospheric Sciences building—the PMM building it was called in those days, Physics, Maths and Meteorology—had been built and they were just moving in.

The Atmospheric Sciences had got the top floor, the whole top floor, but there was a little piece to the west end there—about the size of a small house—and they said, “Hey, you can have this piece at the end there.”

So we moved into this place from the Quonset huts, and set up our darkrooms and got on with the work of the Lunar Atlas. There’s how it all started. We started off in very modest form with just the six of us.

William Hartmann

At that time if you went into the Steward Observatory library, which I remember doing a lot, and you looked on the shelves, a lot of the astronomical literature was in publications from individual observatories. This was a tradition going back to the 1800s or so, because in those days there weren’t widespread and reliable series of journals. This was typically a European tradition, where great laboratories and observatories had their own series of publications that were sent out around the world to other institutions. Certainly some were very old, over a hundred years old, some of them. And Kuiper was still very much in that European tradition.

So observatories tended to publish their own results, sometimes as little booklets, which would be the product of some big survey program that they had been working. Those were circulated among the observatories.

That was a clear tradition, and Kuiper came in with that image in his head, and started up this Communications of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory series. That was another one of my jobs, actually, being a junior co-editor of that, to help move it along. I’d go over to the printers to deliver copies and bring them back, and sometimes editing, to make sure everything was set up right.

Floyd Herbert

There was a University President in those days, Richard Harvill, who had a lot of ambition for this University. We cheeky graduate students used to make fun of him all the time, but his idea was he was going to make the UA into “The Harvard of the West,” or something like that. So he was very open to creating first-rank departments. People of great ability like Kuiper and Sonett at the Lunar Lab and Aden Meinel at Optical Sciences and the various guys over at Steward would present him with their plans for making their respective departments much more high powered. He was quite supportive of that. That all came from Harvill. He made it all possible.

George Coyne

Finally the Space Sciences Building was built [in 1965], and we all moved in there. There was enthusiasm about all the research. Tom Gehrels was extremely active. Elizabeth Roemer is one of the best comet astronomers in the world. The Department was essentially Tom Gehrels, Elizabeth Roemer, Ewen Whitaker, Bob Strom, and then he had a lot of non-faculty positions, a lot of research positions. They were filled by younger people.

Very soon Kuiper built up some real strengths. He hired Frank Low, who was eminent. Frank Low was developing the whole field of infrared astronomy, which from that time became a very important field. In fact, although it was called the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, a lot of the research there was on non-planetary objects. Frank was there for many years in that Department, in that research group, but he was doing a lot of work on stars, on any kind of infrared source that was significant. The research was really front-line. The whole selection of sites for the Moon, the first landing on the Moon and all—that research group contributed a lot to that program. That was the early years of LPL.

Harold Larson

This building was built by NASA to provide a place in this country for planetary science to be conducted away from astronomers, because astronomers looked down on planetary people. Astronomers didn’t let planetary people have time on telescopes. Astronomers thought that the planets weren’t very interesting and asteroids were worse—stars and galaxies, these were the things that warranted those resources.

NASA of course saw the need to do supporting observations because of the space program that was just coming on line, the Apollo mission to the Moon. Nobody had maps of the Moon; nobody knew what the Moon was made out of. To take pictures and to try to understand more detail of what the Moon was going to be like when we landed on it, NASA created this place.

Kuiper populated it with people like Ewen Whitaker and Bob Strom and Tom Gehrels and Pat Roemer, all of whom were doing things that complemented each other, all of which were deemed important to provide background information for the space program. NASA built a telescope that accompanied the building, which is the 61-inch up in the Catalinas. That was dedicated to planetary work. It was a place in the country where planetary astronomy and supporting planetary research could be conducted without the interference and constraints that typically applied in other institutions where astronomy was king.

John Lewis

There was a conference here in Tucson called the Arizona Conference on Planetary Atmospheres, and as a graduate student who was working on the chemistry of Venus I came to the conference and presented a paper. Gerard Kuiper, the Head of the Department, was at the conference, and he invited me to come over and tour the lab. It was a fairly new building. It had been occupied only about three years; very up-to-date, beautiful astronomical facilities. He showed me the shops down in the basement where they processed mirrors and optics and so on.

That evening tour ended in his office. He had his office set up sort of like a church. There was a raised alter at the front of the room—a very long room—and he had a little living room set up at one end. There was a raised dais about a step high, where his desk was, down at the end of the room. Then he had the flag of Arizona and the flag of the United States on either side of his desk. You felt like saluting when you came into the room. I should have caught a clue from these circumstances that this was an unusual operation.

Charles Wood

Kuiper was very much interested in art. He studied to be a painter when he was young, and he always tried to have artists around him. In fact, he had a little cottage in the backyard of his house on Sawtelle Avenue, and he gave it free to a guy that I met, who was an artist. He wanted to have artists and art in his life. He was very interested in music and things like that. He was sort of the old fashioned gentlemen scholar, I think.

He also hired a sculptor, Ralph Turner. Ralph was hired to take the photographs of the Moon that we had from telescopes and from some spacecraft, and to make three-dimensional models of those objects—of craters, or of mountains on the Moon—and then he would have a light source that would have the light shining on his model the same angle it was for each of the photographs that we had.

He would continually change his model until it matched every photograph that he had, and then that would be an accurate model of that feature on the Moon. Then we could measure the angels, the slopes of the features, and the depths of them and whatnot.

It was a very unusual way of finding out about the topography of the Moon. If you go in the Lunar Lab, on the main floor there’s a grey model on the wall—it must be about six or eight feet across—and that’s one of Ralph’s, one of his models of a peak on the Moon. It’s still there.

Alika Herring was another one of these strange guys that Kuiper latched onto. He was from Hawaii, and he made his living doing two things. He played the Hawaiian steel guitar, and he made telescopes. He ground mirrors for telescopes and worked for a company that made telescopes for amateur astronomers.

He made a telescope for one of the Ranger spacecraft, I believe, that went to the Moon, and then he stayed on and he made drawings of the Moon using the photographs and using visual observations with some of the Lunar Lab telescopes. That was another sort of unusual thing, a throwback to the past. It used to be the way people studied the Moon a hundred years ago was by making drawings. Kuiper made the first really high-quality photographic atlas of the Moon, but he also was willing to have somebody who had keen eyesight and good telescopes to make drawings as well.

Harold Larson

I was one of the few people who could write a program in Fortran, and use the very few computers that existed. It was that combination of background and skills that allowed me to step in and take over Kuiper’s [airborne spectroscopy] project.

I remember asking him, “You know, I’ve never had…” I don’t know if I said this, but I didn’t think I could name the nine planets.

He said, “It doesn’t matter. You learn planetary science by doing it.”

To this day, the department says we don’t offer an undergraduate minor or major in planetary science because you should be good at something else. Be a good physicist, a good chemist, geoscientist, and you can pick up the planetary stuff on the job. Kuiper saw no problem with hiring me without any background in astronomy. In fact, it’s not been a limitation.

William Hubbard

I talked to Kuiper some about his philosophy of planetary exploration. He said, “What do humans do when they get to a new place? The first thing they do is look around. You have to be able to look around.”

I was trained as a traditional astrophysicist. Astrophysicists don’t look at pretty pictures. They look at data and they apply high-powered mathematics to analyze the data and infer basic physical processes. Just looking at pictures isn’t going to get you anywhere.

That was part of the, I might say contempt, that the astrophysicists had for planetary scientists back in those days, is that all they were doing was looking at pictures and they weren’t doing fundamental science.

You have to disagree with that when you start seeing pictures like the Cassini pictures which show such intricate physical processes; for example, the rings of Saturn. There’s so much beautiful physics being exhibited there, and certainly even in landforms on satellites. So I think that was a rather unenlightened point of view, which probably originated with just the low resolution of images available from spacecraft in those days.

Robert Strom

Even before we had the lunar orbiter, there was a program here which I was involved in to obtain high resolution telescopic images from the Earth. That was done right here in the Catalina Mountains, with a telescope that Kupier had built and was sponsored by NASA. We went up almost every night to photograph the Moon at the highest resolution we could and produced an atlas from that.

William Hartmann

In the mid-sixties, when I was still a graduate student, I have distinct memories of walking across the campus and looking up and seeing the daytime Moon in the Arizona sky very clearly. I’d be thinking to myself, gee, it’s only going to go around maybe 60 times before we actually try to land on it. Having grown up looking at the Moon through my telescope in the backyard and making drawings of the craters and so forth, it was kind of a personal relationship with the Moon.

Michael Drake

In Kuiper’s day, it was initially planetary astronomy. He realized that going to the Moon you were looking at a rocky body. He brought in some of the first planetary geologists. Bob Strom is the most prominent of those—to this day he’s the world’s expert on Mercury, and the guy who figured out that Venus was resurfaced a few hundred million years ago.

Kuiper’s appreciation of geology actually came from a very odd thing. He got it in his head, correctly, that Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be a great astronomical observatory site. In the process of looking at Mauna Kea, he flew over the lava flows in Hawaii. He recognized what lava flows looked like from the air, and then when he looked through telescopes and subsequently orbiting spacecraft at the Moon, he realized he was looking at lava flows.

That sounds like a simple thing now—we all know the dark areas of the Moon are made of basaltic lava—but in the 1960s, before Apollo, there were other thoughts. Harold Urey, Kuiper’s great competitor—along with Kuiper one of the two founders of planetary science—thought the Moon was completely primitive, undifferentiated. He called it a Rosetta Stone: You could see what all the original building blocks looked like if you went to the Moon. But Kuiper knew what lava flows looked like from above, and realized he was seeing lava flows out there.

Paul Geissler

When Gerard Kuiper first got here, his charge was to map the Moon, and understand the geology of the Moon well enough to be able to land a person on it, because this was imminent. They were going to land somebody on there, and one of the hypotheses at the time was that the thing was just an electrostatically-charged clump of dust, and as soon as you stepped out of your spacecraft you were going to fall into dust as high as your eye.

It was an unlikely theory, but there was no way to prove it wrong, because nobody had done the research. And we were just a few years away from landing somebody there. That was why LPL got started to begin with, so one of the tasks was to make really good maps of the Moon and be able to choose places to land.

What they would do is go out to the telescope and take these gorgeous pictures of it, but of course it was what we call a point-perspective projection. It’s not even a round globe; it’s just what you see. What they would do is put those in a slide projector, take them down to the basement, and in the basement of LPL—I think it’s still hanging up there now—is a round sphere. They’d go way across the building and project this thing onto the sphere from a distance, and come around and take photographs of the sphere. They’d be able to get various perspectives of the Moon that you wouldn’t be able to see from Earth. Things that looked like ovals would become circles. The things those guys did in the days before digital image processing were amazing.

Harold Larson

This was an exciting period of time when things were being done for the first time. In that kind of environment, this is where discoveries are made. If you’re the first person to ever look at something with a particular technique and a particular wavelength region, with some resource that no one has ever had access to before, the easy things are hanging there waiting to be plucked.

Kuiper and Frank Low and us—myself and the men who worked with me—we were plucking all the easy things. We were discovering water on Jupiter and a lot of things that with hindsight were easy. But back then none of us really felt comfortable. We were always pushing the limit of something, and never knew what was going to happen, and always surprised and amazed that we were achieving results that got national attention. It was a privileged time to be working in science.

Robert Strom

Kuiper passed away at Christmas time, in Mexico, in 1973. That was just after the launch [of Mariner 10]. The first encounter with Mercury was March of ’74, so he missed it. That was a shame; he never got to see Mercury. But he had a crater named after him both on Mars and on Mercury.

Ewen Whitaker

Round about the time Kuiper died, we were beginning to get in people from outside with these other fields. The whole subject was already expanding with all this stuff, especially that came back from Apollo with all the samples, a huge amount of geophysics and oh, just the whole plethora of subjects that were coming along. People were being hired at LPL to take over or help with these other, outside subjects. So from then on we started expanding in all fields.

Floyd Herbert

Way back in the beginning Kuiper and that bunch were advising the lunar astronauts what to do when they got to the Moon. To give them a little bit of ground realism, they used to haul them down to a volcanic area just over the border of Mexico called the Pinacate Mountains. It’s a volcanic field. There are cinder cones and calderas, the geologists call it, which is basically a circular hole in the ground that’s created by some kind of explosion.

So they took the astronauts down there at least once and they went around with their rock hammers and picked samples and stuff like that. Bill and Dale and Alan were part of that. They were very geologically-oriented, at least in those days.

Then they started going down there just on their own for fun. I used to go down there with them. We’ve made many trips down to the Pinacates—go down there, camp out, take some pictures. My buddy Chuck Wood did his master’s thesis down there, marching across some of the craters with a gravity-measuring device and a magnetic field-measuring device, which gives you some clue as to what’s under the ground there—big masses of basaltic rock have a little more density, so you get a microscopic extra gravity down there.

So some real science was done down there, but it was also a lot of fun. Nobody else went there. We pretty much had it to ourselves. Then it got to be more widely known, of course, and it suddenly became popular to go out into nature, so lots of people started going down there. The Mexicans turned it into a National Park, and now there’s a bunch of rules and regulations. Hardly anybody ever goes down there anymore. But in the old days it was a great thing. It was the closest thing to going to the Moon that we could do.

Charles Wood

In the late sixties I had long hair, and marched in some protests and whatnot, and so Kuiper thought I was sort of the resident hippie of the Lunar Lab. But he knew me, so he knew I was all right. He would come to work every Saturday morning and he would get lonely or something. Every once in a while he would send the student worker over to my apartment, and she’d knock on the door. I’d usually be asleep—this was Saturday mornings—and she’d say, “Dr. Kuiper wants to talk to you.”

So I’d go over there and he’d just ask me a few questions about something and then he would start storytelling. He told me about after World War II when he was trying to find [Wernher] von Braun, who was the German rocket designer, because the United States wanted to bring von Braun back to the U.S. before the Russians got him. He had part of a German rocket motor that von Braun had built in his office, which he showed me, and he talked about his early days as an astronomer. It was really amazing to have him need an audience, and I was the audience.

He was concerned that the students were going to riot at the University; that they’d be so upset with the U.S. government that they’d riot. He thought because the Lunar Lab was funded by the federal government that they might attack our building sometime. So I had to assure him several times that I didn’t think the students knew the Lunar Lab was funded by the government, or cared.

Dale Cruikshank

At that time Kitt Peak had only one telescope, and it was the 36-inch telescope, which has since been replaced with something bigger. We had to drive up the old road, which is still maintained as an emergency egress, but it was a terrible dusty old road. On several occasions we would drive up there in the back of a pickup truck, Kuiper and I and one other student hanging on more or less for dear life, because our old car broke down and we had to go up that way.

William Hartmann

It must have been ’69, I’m sitting there in my assistant professor office, and the phone rings. It’s Bruce Murray, who’s a very well known planetary scientist, who was Head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at that time. I picked up my phone and here’s Bruce Murray saying “We’ve got this probe going to Mars, would you like to be on the imaging team?”

So it’s falls right into my lap. I contrast that with today: When a new mission gets announced they’ll be 200 bright, bushy-tailed scientists with fresh PhDs trying to get on that mission. Everybody’s trying to get on. Usually you have like ten people initially and maybe you add another ten if the mission gets launched successfully. Six of those will be the old, established people in the field anyway, so then there are two or three or four slots for young scientists who have to compete with all these other scientists.

I’m so lucky, I’m just at the right time and the phone rings and Bruce Murray puts me on his imaging team. It really was kind of a golden age of science. Kennedy had said that we’re going to the Moon, so we’re all engaged in that program. There was very few of us in planetary science at that time. Kuiper’s first group of students included Toby Owen and Carl Sagan before him—Carl Sagan had come out of the University of Chicago when Kuiper was back there—so you have Sagan and Toby Owen and Cruikshank and Binder and me, and a handful of other students at a few other scattered universities at that time. It was a great time to be doing this stuff, because there weren’t very many young people coming out with degrees. Bruce Murray has to scrape the bottom of a nearly empty barrel to get me.

Charles Wood

I was very lucky. We were all pretty good friends. We’re still friends today, almost fifty years later. We all would work together and go to movies together; I remember when we saw West Side Story, and we all came out walking in a line and snapping our fingers like we were the Jets.

It was really a transformative thing in my life to be at the Lunar Lab. I came being a person who was fascinated with space and science fiction, and I had built a small telescope when I was in high school and looked at the Moon and the planets. But being at the Lunar Lab I was immediately in contact with the most important planetary scientist on the Earth, Kuiper, and the people I worked with, the guys who were graduate students, Hartmann and Cruikshank and Binder, were all doing neat research things.

It was a place where I saw there were opportunities and I could do more and have a more exciting life than perhaps I might have thought. If I hadn’t gone there maybe I would’ve ended up being a shoe salesman or something. Again, the word lucky keeps coming up. I was lucky to have that chance.

Harold Larson, on the airborne spectroscopy program

I’d never been in Arizona, so I just got off a plane and here I was. Everything was new, shocking. I didn’t know what was happening because I took this job by mail from France. I like to say I was a mail-order professor. I hadn’t made any visits; I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never met Kuiper; all I had was two letters from him.

So that was the way I arrived, and it took a while to settle in and figure out what my role would be. Kuiper of course was pioneering the use of aircraft. He wanted to use this particular type of spectrometer that Harold Johnson was developing, perhaps more for use on the ground, but Kuiper saw a role for it in an airplane.

So there was an emerging technology, all kinds of changes, all kinds of potential—discovery potential, you might say—and Kuiper had the sense to know that he could be one of the first people using it.

That’s why he hired me through the mail. I was working in France on a post-doc with a team of people who had also been pioneering the use of this kind of instrumentation, not for aircraft, but for ground-based telescopes. I had become familiar with the optics, the technique, the computer programs. My job when I came here was basically to step in and pick up the pieces, and continue developing this program of airborne spectroscopy.

So as soon as I got here I got engrossed in what he was doing on the CV-990; that was the four-engine passenger jet that NASA had acquired. Nothing worked. Nothing even came close to working. But we acquired experience with trying to make things work in what really is a very hostile environment.

Then something very tragic happened. The plane we were using crashed. It crashed out on Moffett field, in the Bay area, and that put an end to what Kuiper was trying to do. But by that time he had demonstrated well enough the potential that NASA replaced that plane with a bigger plane, the C-141, which is a military aircraft, and which eventually had a 36-inch diameter telescope. That isn’t a very big telescope by today’s standards, but it’s a very big telescope because it has to look through a hole in a plane that wasn’t designed for it.

That facility came on-stream after Kuiper died. He saw the plane, but he never flew on it. He walked through it, but he never flew on it. It was eventually dedicated to him. After he died it was dedicated to him because of his pioneering work directing NASA’s attention to doing astronomy this way.

The C-141 became operational in ’74. I was one of the first groups to fly on it, and one of the last. For me it was about a 25-year involvement. It was a plane that had no insulation, so it was noisy, it was cold, it had no windows, and you just sat their for 72 hours being bored because nothing was happening, or when you were observing, you were watching your instrumentation, you were worried about things going wrong every second, and while computers were running everything you were always ready to press buttons and take control if something happened.

Observing isn’t pleasant. It is hard work, it’s tiring, and 80 to 90 percent of what you do is never useful for anything. It’s a very low efficiency operation. But then you get a discovery. And then you forget all the bad moments because suddenly something is important. We had enough discoveries to make the whole effort worthwhile.

George Rieke, on inventing infrared astronomy

Gerard [Kuiper] had a sort of strange attitude for something called the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, that is, he brought in people that did, I would say, slightly offbeat but very technically advanced kinds of astronomy. [Harold] Johnson left before I joined the lab, but I gather that he used to joke that he was in the stellar division of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, which was sort of true.

Because Gerard had this interest in infrared, one of the offbeat areas that flourished was infrared. So he brought Harold in, and Harold had been befriended by a young physicist named Frank Low while he was in Texas. Harold quickly became Frank’s mentor in getting into infrared astronomy. So then you had three major figures in infrared astronomy—not that there was a field of infrared astronomy, but they became major figures as time went on and people realized how much they developed it.

Harold was the premier person in photometry. He knew how to take the data so you could inter-compare stars and study them and actually make field advances in science. He really started with the first photometry measurements in 1961 or 1962, and in 1966 he published a review article with all the infrared photometry results that he had done. That review article is still cited. It’s incredible that in four years he went from a clean sheet of paper to a mature area of astronomy.

Harold had ideas of how to build [photometric] telescopes that would be cheap, they didn’t have very good optics, and they could be moved quickly around the sky, which meant you’d unclamp the telescope and move it manually, just hang on the telescope and move it. The 28-inch was the first one. Harold and Frank then developed and carried out all kinds of pioneering infrared astronomy using the 28-inch. Harold then got a 60-inch telescope built, which followed the same premise of the photometric telescope. It was getting about as big as you could move with my hand, but that’s how it worked. We shifted a lot of these efforts to the 60-inch.

Gerard had his own 61-inch, and interestingly, I found a progress report that Gerard wrote on the 61-inch about a month after it was first being used. In the progress report it said that Frank had discovered the internal energy of Jupiter—which was one of the major discoveries of infrared astronomy—within that month. It tells you something really interesting, which was that infrared astronomy was super-ready to have discoveries come out. There were things that were well within in reach of the detectors and capabilities that people had then, just sitting there, super-saturated with discoveries ready to be made.

For quite a while the 61-inch in the infrared—at least the thermal infrared, which means the wavelengths beyond two microns—was by far the most sensitive telescope in the world. We used to make observations and send them over to Caltech where there was another infrared group, and they would actually not be able to confirm the observations, but they turned out to be right. They had the 200-inch, but the fact that we had optimized the 61-inch so carefully for this application gave us a big advantage.

There were really three centers of ground-based infrared that sprang up. There’s this one, and shortly after Caltech under Gary Neugebauer, and not too long after that Ed Ney at the University of Minnesota. I think the fact that there were three was actually important. You wouldn’t tell the deep secrets of how you did something, but you would show enough that people could benefit from what you’d done. In some ways the rivalry was fiercer than at present, but in other ways it was much more gentlemanly—the way you imagine science should be done, where people pass things around and say, “What do you think?” I think that sense of community was really important to getting the field started.

George Coyne, on the balloon polarimetry program

My original work with Tom Gehrels was great. We had a nice team there [including Krzysztof Serkowski, Martin Tomasko, and graduate student Ben Zellner]. We would fly balloons, because these were early days of the space program, so you couldn’t send a rocket off into space at that time. But you could send up balloons, which would get up above a lot of the Earth’s atmosphere, and do research in infrared from balloons.

There was an agency of the federal government called the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR. They had a site in Northern Arizona and a site in Palestine, Texas for launching these things. One of the exciting things we’d do is once or twice a year we’d go to these sites and we’d fly these balloons. They were very early days so even methods of collecting your data were being developed.

Then the polarization went into all kinds of new and exciting areas. We first discovered that some stars give off polarized light. That’s very important for knowing the kind of structure of the atmosphere of the star. Then we found that some galaxies give off polarized light, because they have very energetic sources at their center and that light is scattered as it comes out from the galaxy. So that whole research in polarimetry began to broaden from planetary into all kinds of other objects. They were the early days of my research.

Don McCarthy, on observing with Frank Low

Frank Low was always fun on observing runs, because he has this tremendous insight into what problems were. We were just exploring. We measured some of the first sizes of astronomical objects. That became my thesis, and it led to me doing the same kind of work at the Multiple Mirror Telescope [MMT], which back then was six separate 72-inch telescopes.

No one had really ever envisioned that you could adjust the way light bounces to each telescope so that all those distances were equal, so that instead of the telescope performing as six separate 72-inch mirrors, it performed as one 6.5-meter telescope that you just used six parts of. We learned how to make those adjustments. That was the start of a different kind of interferometry, which you have today at many different facilities where the telescopes are separate and you bring the light together.

One day we were driving up the MMT road [on Mt. Hopkins] for one of these observing runs, and this was before the MMT was dedicated. They had what were called Friday Night Specials: They would have Friday nights devoted to scientists who would come up there and try to do experiments under non-ideal conditions. We were doing one. So Frank’s driving us up the mountain, which is a very scary road and was scarier then before they paved a lot of it.

We go around a corner—it’s a one-lane road—and this big Greyhound bus comes down suddenly from the other side. Frank’s reactions were very quick: He took us right into the side of the mountain; not on the outside of the mountain but the inside.

The Greyhound bus—there was no way that momentum was going to stop. They were practicing for the dedication of the mountain the following week or two. Those Greyhound buses were out there without anyone’s knowledge, just learning the road.

The interferometry actually began on the 21-inch telescope here right behind us. Frank gave instructions that if I ever got it working to phone him no matter what time it was. So I remember 3am phoning him when we had the first interferometer working. That led to the MMT eventually, and to the design of the Large Binocular Telescope because it’s two separate mirrors whose light you want to combine. So the legacy of that was pretty huge, and we had some fun times doing it.

There aren’t many times when you have a place or a group of people who start something completely new. It’s getter harder and harder to do, I think. What Frank Low did with infrared astronomy is simply not common or maybe not possible today: To make a new kind of detector or instrument here on your desk, take it to a mountain, put it on a telescope and discover that Jupiter has its own energy source. That’s just not common. To explore a whole new realm of the electromagnetic spectrum was really odd. Or to start a whole new way of exploring, namely the space program, which LPL figured in so prominently, is really amazing. It’s not like it was in the LPL days of infrared astronomy, where you put together a detector and haul it up a mountain and you’re doing an observation and discovering something all in the same day.

Steve Larson, on Kuiper’s search for telescope sites

I grew up under Kuiper’s style. Most of the great investigators and scientists at the time of course were very proud of their work and worked hard to maintain their position in the field and all that. But Kuiper was of such stature, all the people in the lab basically went along with what he dictated.

He was fully aware of the fact that in the post-Apollo era of NASA it might be difficult to get funding for the kind of research that was going on at the time. So he started looking at other sources. He was spending a fair amount of time with a colleague in Mexico, Guillermo Haro, who was interested in striking up collaboration with American observatories. They had some money at the time to build an observatory, so he spent time site testing for new observatories. He used to fly down to places like Southern Baja with small telescopes, to see what the seeing was like.

One of Kuiper’s true legacies was identification and establishment of what are considered now great observatories. He was the primary ruler in establishing Mauna Kea observatory, and in fact the first telescope set up there to do site testing was an LPL telescope, a little 12-inch telescope that was used to determine how good the seeing was. An observer went there for several months out of the year. That kicked things off at what many people now consider now the premier ground-based site.

Funny as things went, that was sitting on a cinder cone that is now considered sacred, and there is no telescope there. It’s the one peak that has no telescope. All the telescopes are on other ones nearby. He was getting ready to put a proposal to NSF to build telescopes up there with Harvard, and the Hawaiian politicians got involved, saying Hawaii should be involved, so they ended up going another route to develop the telescopes. But he also, in conjunction with the Mexicans, helped established the San Pedro Mártir Observatory in Northern Baja. In fact the crew that attended the telescopes here took a month off and went down there and actually plowed the road to the top. That turned out to be a very good site.

He was always looking for high sites. He had looked at the San Francisco peak, Agassiz Peak as a high altitude site. The higher you go, of course, the less water vapor you have to look out through, which absorb infrared radiation, so you want to be in tall mountains. His search for the ideal infrared site was one of the reasons they named the Kuiper Airborne Observatory aircraft, the C-141, which was used with a 36-inch telescope for many years.

Of course Kuiper had worked hard to establish the telescopes on the Catalinas, and had in fact, when the Air Force vacated their summit with the radar site, wrote a proposal to use that for a site, which is still used today.

William Hartmann, on the Mauna Kea telescope site

In the summer of ’64, Kuiper was the first person to get the idea that there should be observatories on Mauna Kea, or at least that Mauna Kea might be a fantastically good site for observatories. This is funny because what they were looking for was lack of water vapor. Water vapor absorbs the infrared light coming in through the atmosphere, so you want to get up above it. You’d think the worst place would be out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But Mauna Kea is so big—14,000 feet—it sticks up above most of it. Kuiper hit on this idea of going up there and seeing if there could be an observatory there.

Kuiper had a history of hiring interesting, off-beat people, like Ewen Whitaker. He had been the head of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association, which is basically an amateur association. Another example was Alika Herring, a guy who built very high quality amateur-sized telescopes, and Kuiper hired him to come in and take his homemade telescope down to Hawaii and do site testing down there.

In the spring of 1964, Alika had been down there for a couple of months, I guess, living up at the 10,000 foot level in little stone cabins that were sort of Ranger cabins and then driving up to the 14,000 foot level at night. Okay, time for Alika to have a vacation. Kuiper sends young Bill, me, down to Hawaii.

That was the first time I had ever been to Hawaii. I just completely fell in love with the Big Island; it’s such a wonderful place to be. Kuiper said, “Now, you take some days off and go down to see the volcano part, because this is part of your training, and see craters and lava flows and all of that,” which I had not seen before, coming from Pennsylvania. So I did site testing down there, for what became Mauna Kea Observatory.

Some years passed, and that turns into a big world-class observatory. By the 1980s, Dale Cruikshank, my buddy who had worked on the spectrometers for Kuiper, had gone off to the University of Hawaii and is doing infrared spectrometry, and following exactly the footsteps that Kuiper had trained him in.

Mel Simmons, on the construction of the 61-inch telescope

I came in ’64 at the request of Dr. Kuiper, because the construction of what we call the 61-inch, later referred to as the 1.5-meter, had been stopped. The U of A had more billings than money available to complete the telescope. So the Comptroller’s Office stopped construction and said, “No more work until we see what’s going on.”

Kuiper called me, and I went in and took the job to see what was going on. I worked over in the Comptroller’s Office for about a month. I got a copy of the contract with Western Gear because that’s where the problem was, with the telescope itself. Not with the dome, but the telescope. I went over every invoice from the time it started to where they stopped it, and then I classified all the invoices paid or not paid, as well as what I thought were erroneous billings.

Anyway, I spent about a month going through all the invoices, and then I told Sherwood Carr who was the Comptroller at the time that I was going to call Western Gear, the contractor, and tell them I would like for them to send a man over to go over every invoice, one with the authority to void an invoice. I spent about three weeks with him, and he agreed with me, and okayed all the ones I said were okay and voided all the others.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we finished the construction. Kuiper had an optical professional from Scotland [Robert Waland] to grind the mirrors that was to be in the telescope. We made the mirror in the basement of the Space Science building. Probably the instruments used for the grinding are still in the basement. When Astronomy got in on it later in the years—because they wanted to put all the telescopes together—they referred to it as a 1.5-meter.

We had enough money left to do the dormitory. We went ahead and started construction, and because we didn’t go through Physical Resources they wouldn’t furnish anybody to look at the construction and see if it was being followed the way we had it outlined. So I used Arnold Evans, who was in charge of the observatory facilities, to check all the construction because I was down here and didn’t go up there that often.

He did a great job. We finished the construction of the dormitory; we still had a little bit of money left over. So I talked to the contractors that built these cabins, and he gave me enough—just gave it to me—enough redwood to cover the steps. The telescope was up above and the dormitory was down, behind it, on the North side. So we had to have steps, and in the wintertime those would be covered with snow, and a tired man observing was liable to slide all the way down. So we covered the steps with redwood and made it safe.

Later we built another telescope up there, a small one, for Dr. [Elizabeth] Roemer. Dr. Kuiper was spending most of his time trying different areas, testing them, and some of the areas he tested were Pikes Peak, Colorado, and Flagstaff. He went over to where the University now has telescopes on Mt. Graham, and he did a test there. As I remember, Dr. Kuiper felt there was a little bit too much moisture as far as he was concerned, so he dropped that.

But then he went to Hawaii, Mauna Kea. We took a 21-inch telescope over there, about halfway up the mountain, where he did a lot of testing. He talked NASA into building the telescope that’s there, through the University of Hawaii. He then tested the Mexico site for a telescope. We built a road to the top so he could test the site. He put a 21-inch telescope up there for testing; later on they had their telescope up there.

After Dr. Kuiper left, he still went on to do all this testing. We have the radar site that’s up on Mt. Lemmon itself. It was owned by the Forest Service. But the military had it as a radar site and there were a couple of radar buildings up there. I went out and talked to the DM because I was in the materials division of the Air Force and I was in the Army Air Corps then; it’s just Air Force now. I went out and talked to them and they gave me a letter releasing the site, to the University. Then I went to the Forest Service and they approved it.

We took over their buildings and they’re still there. There were two domes that weren’t quite what you’d want for an observatory, but they still worked fine for infrared, and that’s what we had to do. We got tractors and snowplows and trucks and trailers and stuff we needed when we were doing all this testing of different sites for Kuiper. One of the tractors went to Mexico when Arnold Evans built the road up to the top. That’s where they have their telescope now. I think the 21-inch is still about halfway up to Mauna Kea, before they get in to where they need to have oxygen. That’s where he did his testing and found it to be great.

That’s the reason I came in was to get the construction of the Kuiper Telescope—then the 61-inch—done and completed. I think there’s probably a 21-inch telescope in Flagstaff, too; I think he left one there. You’ll find them all over. I think there’s one in Flagstaff, one in Hawaii, and one in Mexico. He used them for testing.

Ewen Whitaker, on the 61-inch telescope

In the earlier days, when we first got the telescope going, in order to have the eyepieces together I’d got a “Saniflush” box, a junk box, made into a thing with holes so the eyepieces would sit in it. I believe it’s still up in the dome. Completely wrecked, I’m sure. You’d think, okay, we’ve got these highly expensive eyepieces, let’s make a nice box for them, a wooden box. Was it ever made? No.

George Coyne, on the consolidation of the telescopes

Up until that time all the telescopes had been naturally under the administration of the Astronomy Department. When Kuiper came he got NASA funding to build what was then a major telescope, which is still there near Bigelow Mountain. The 61-inch it’s called. That was built to be a high-quality imaging telescope for the Ranger program, to map the Moon to select the sites. Of course that came under the administration of LPL, and eventually the Department of Planetary Sciences.

Ewen Whitaker

Ranger 6 went off on the day it was supposed to. I’d chosen a place in Mare Tranquillitatis where the angles would be right and it’d be free of rocks and hopefully we’d photograph some domes on the Moon as it went down. But of course Ranger 6, something went wrong with the high voltage in the spacecraft. Before it got out of the atmosphere—and of course in low-pressure atmosphere you can jump sparks long-distances—sparks must’ve jumped and burned out the cameras or something.

So poor Ranger 6 never took any pictures. This was pretty sad. We were all at JPL and the launch was successful and up it went. We got there and we were all chewing our pencils waiting for the news: It’s getting near the Moon—time for camera switch-on—no news of camera switch-on. We’re getting closer to the Moon, distance to the Moon only a thousand kilometers—still no sign of warm-up, switch-on. The signals had ceased. We said, okay, the spacecraft has crashed.

That was Ranger 6. All right, back to the drawing boards. They found out what they thought was the problem with the high voltage, and redesigned it slightly. The next one was Ranger 7. I got this call from Gene Shoemaker once again: “Please find places for Ranger 7 to land.”

The third day of launch would’ve been the best one, and that was the one that was chosen. It went off because the weather was good, and finally got there and everything went fine—Yes, we’ve got camera turn-on! We were all at JPL, there was Urey, and Kuiper, and me, of course all the JPL engineers and everything; it was a big whoopee-do.

There were no pictures coming back live, we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear the signal from the cameras, just a tone coming in, signaling that the video was coming in. It was being recorded out in the Mojave Desert there, one of the tracking stations. So that was that, and of course it was hey, hey, popping champagne and everything.

But of course we hadn’t got the films. They had to be stored, put in a truck and driven down from the Mojave Desert which was a hundred-and-some miles away, so we didn’t get them for quite a long time. Then we got these things and they started printing out of pictures from them, and we got the first few prints—Oh, look at this, wow, you can see these craters! Of course the thing’s photographing as it came in closer and closer, just a solid series of pictures from all these six cameras, and so the view that you got closer and closer all the time.

The press conference was going to be that day, so I think we were all up 26 hours without any sleep. Anyway, Kuiper was on it: “This is a great day for science and a great day for the United States,” and a big whoopee-do and everything. That was very exciting.

Then I went back to England, but I had a two-week stay over here because we got all the negatives of the films—35 millimeter films, just like you put into your camera, but very long films—and then I chose a selection of things and printed up all these negatives. Oh, I tell you, two weeks of solid darkroom work. We got back to Tucson eventually and we had five months of writing out experimenter’s reports, so that meant looking at all these pictures and coming up with our theories. It was really an exciting time but very busy.

Charles Wood

Kuiper was the Principal Investigator, and finally Ranger 7 worked. It had television cameras that photographed ever-closer views as the spacecraft approached and finally hit the Moon, and these were broadcasted live on national TV. I remember Kuiper being interviewed right after that happened, and his first statement was, “This has been a great day for America, this is a great day for science.” That’s how he began. So it was really stirring.

Alan Binder

The first time I knew of Kuiper, he was on television. He had been interviewed at McDonald Observatory—I can still see an image of him standing out on the balcony, talking about astronomy. Kuiper knew that you had to get the public interested in what you were doing. That was a source of funding. He had the European polish and he could talk people into doing what he wanted to in terms of money. Those were his great qualities: He sold what he was doing.

He was the Principal Investigator on Ranger. There were several Rangers and they all failed, and finally we got to Ranger 7 which worked. It took amazing photographs. Bill and Dale and I would run down to the newspaper because they would get the first pictures; because television didn’t quite carry them in the way you wanted it to.

Ranger had gone down and taken these incredible photographs as it crashed on the Moon, and Kuiper got up at the news conference at JPL, and in typical Kuiper fashion, “These pictures are not ten times better than astronomical pictures, which would be phenomenal in itself. They are not a hundred times better than astronomical pictures, which is what the engineers promised us. They are one thousand times better.”

It just brought the house down. He just had that way of connecting with the public. I learned that from him: That you need to have the public involved, and that’s what really counts. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that. Kuiper really valued that, and I give him a tremendous amount of credit.

Charles Wood

There was a sequence of a wide-angled view and then closer, so a smaller area being seen. The thing we realized was, my gosh, there were craters everywhere. The most close-up picture that we had, there were still craters everywhere. And my job was measuring craters, and I thought, my god, this is never going to end. There’s going to be continuing stuff to do here.

Guy Consolmagno

The thrilling thing was not just seeing the Moon coming at you—because they had the first picture, the next picture closer up, the next picture close up—but below they said, “Live from the Moon.”

Steve Larson

At that time I was working in the darkroom. We got the first high resolution images of the surface of the Moon from this crash-landing spacecraft. After many tries, they finally got a couple to work. It was all very exciting, because we were trying to extract as much information as possible just from imaging, and there was a lot of contention at the time about whether or not the surface was even strong enough to sustain the landing of a spacecraft. Some people predicted this was a very loose, powdery thing that would just swallow it up when we tried to land.

Charles Wood

Kuiper got time on the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope and Alika Herring and I went up to see the impact of Ranger 9, because there had been some suggestion that the Moon had a lot of dust on it, and there might be a large cloud of dust from the impact. So we got to use this really large telescope to look at the Moon with our eyeballs. Almost nobody, then or now, looks at the Moon with a large telescope with their eyeballs. I remember the stability of the atmosphere for seconds would be very good, and we could see tiny, tiny craters on the Moon that no one had ever seen before. They had never been photographed before. It was just very exciting. And when the spacecraft hit—we had the radio on; we could hear when it hit—there was absolutely nothing. That showed us and anybody else who was concerned that no, there wasn’t a huge amount of dust on the Moon.

Robert Strom

Gerard Kuiper and Ewen Whitaker were involved in what was called the Ranger program, which was to send a spacecraft to the Moon and hard-land, impact it, but on the way down take these high resolution pictures, getting closer and closer and closer to see what the surface was composed of.

Ranger 7 was the first successful one, and sent back these high resolution pictures. We looked at those, and did geological analysis. There was still a debate about what the craters were. Were they volcanic or were they impact? That was a heated debate and was really not settled until probably around the late sixties. It turned out that the evidence was very strong that these were impact craters and not volcanic at all.

But it was still argued about what the lunar maria was. This is the dark areas of the Moon. We thought it probably lava. Others thought, no, it was just dust that you’d sink in. Well, the high resolution images from Ranger did not answer the question of whether this stuff was dusty or whether it was solid rock. So after Ranger, there was the Surveyor spacecraft. These were soft-landers, and during those missions there was also a lunar orbiter sent up there to get very high resolution images of the surface of the Moon. Then when the Surveyor soft-landed that would tell whether it would hold the spacecraft or sink in.

It turned out that the Surveyor spacecraft showed that the Moon’s surface was in fact firm enough that it would hold up a spacecraft landing on it, and it dug in the surface and sent back high resolution pictures. It became very clear at that point that, yeah, you could land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon without it sinking down to hundreds of feet.

Ewen Whitaker

With Surveyor 1 was on Gene Shoemaker’s team. We were in charge of the cameras, what they would photograph. With the first Surveyor, they tracked it down and it photographed all the flat areas, the panoramas. But on the horizon there were little bright peaks. They knew roughly where they were on the Moon, in Flamsteed P.

The people at JPL and others, they figured out the place the thing had landed, because of the way the peaks looked. This was their theory and they published it in Science. I looked at this and thought, “I don’t know, that doesn’t sound right to me.” So I did a real job, I got some better pictures from JPL. They sent them to me of the mountains that you could see in this little piece of the panorama, and I got one of our best pictures—we’d taken it with the 82-inch in Texas—and sort of straightened it up and did the angles. I figured out where this had to be on the floor of this Flamsteed P flat area so that the angles of the peaks that you were seeing fitted in with what we saw from our Earth-based picture.

Well, that didn’t agree with what they’d written up in Science, so I had to look and see what were the two things the Surveyor radar caught as it was landing, and lo and behold, looking around, there were two very bright little tiny craters. I thought, Oh-oh, I betcha those were the two things that caused the blips in the radar, and therefore from that you could see where the thing had landed.

So I said that Surveyor was right about here. Once they photographed it, it was almost exactly where I predicted from the two craters—very close, within a hundred yards or something. We found out later that Orbiter 1 had actually photographed this thing with its low-resolution camera. You could just pick out a bright spot. Well, then they said, “You’re the one who’s going to find out where these things land in the future,” so that got me that little job, amongst others of course. That was exciting days with all the Surveyors.

Robert Strom

Then things started happening very rapidly, because we were approaching the Apollo era of sending men to the Moon. I was on the lunar operations working group for Apollo 8, 10, and 11. Apollo 11 was the one that landed. We briefed the astronauts on what targets they should image from orbit—they had very good cameras in orbit—and where to take pictures that would be of high scientific interest. All of that is up in the Space Imagery Center here.

Alan Binder

Apollo, in my estimation, is the best thing that humanity has ever done. It was thrilling, because we thought the space program was going somewhere. We were reaching the Moon. Gene Shoemaker had told his students that you’ll be doing your PhD thesis on the Moon. That’s what we believed. It was what we all wanted—some of us wanted to go to the Moon, but we all wanted to study the Moon and the planets. The whole world was listening. Even though the Commies, the Russians, were beaten badly, they were thrilled. The only country that I believe did not tell its people was Communist China. The rest of the world was totally engaged in Apollo.

To see Armstrong and then Aldrin get out, and of course you’ve seen probably the ghostly kind of images—the first TVs weren’t all that hot. Your heart was skipping. God, we’re down! Get the rocks, get the thing done, get back in and make sure you get back. It was so new and it seemed so dangerous that your heart was just in your mouth, so to speak, because you wanted it to succeed. I have all these fantastic memories of Apollo and the men on the Moon, and I envied them so much because I wanted to go. And I still want to go.

Jonathan Lunine

Everybody who was alive at that time, except for the jaded, know where they were when Apollo 11 landed, and I was at the Desert Inn Motel at Miami Beach, Florida, which is where my mom used to take us on summer vacation. Very cheap motel, but it was by the beach. We were there and I remember watching the TV and getting the news about the landing. It was evening there in Florida and then the excitement of being allowed to stay up late to watch the moonwalk, but we didn’t have to stay up late because the astronauts were actually able to get out earlier than expected. We watched these pictures and it was really, really exciting. It seemed to me as a ten-year old that it was the start of a new era.

William Hartmann

I saw the Apollo 11 landing. I was actually up in Flagstaff. My wife Gayle, who I was going with at the time, was working up at the Museum in Northern Arizona. We were invited across the street from the Museum of Northern Arizona. There’s a big, beautiful, white-framed farmhouse-looking thing which was a building that belonged to the Museum. The staff had all gathered there.

We were all sitting around in this nice quaint old house watching this television set. There’re coming around the Moon and now they’re coming around the back of the Moon and yes, we’ve got radio contact again, and now they’re coming around the front side and they’re going to go down and land. [Chet] Huntley and [David] Brinkley were saying this thing about, “Okay, this is such an amazing moment in the history of humanity, we’re just going to stop talking and let you listen to the chatter between Houston and the astronauts,” and that was all coming through. The landing maneuver was just about to start. They’re doing their engine-burn and they’re going to go down, this is going to start in the next few minutes, this is all going to happen, and this little five-year-old kid shouts “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom!” and Daddy has to take him out just at the moment when we’re landing on the Moon.

Charles Sonett

We were halfway between Italy and Corsica, just a summer vacation. It was midnight, and all the Italians on board were being very happy about it all. Just at the moment of landing they were all looking at the TV, and they were whooping it up. It was a very intense time for people working in space. Spent a lot of time in the lab—I remember 60, 80 hour weeks. If you’re getting ready for a flight, you know, you don’t have time to sit around, you have to work day and night. Crazy schedules.

Floyd Herbert

One of the big surprises for everybody was they actually did go to the Moon, but it was the government that did it. Everybody had always thought that it would be some sort of pioneering industrialist that would finance this thing and they’d build it in their backyard. Then it actually happened and, my God, it was a 25 billion dollar project run by the federal government, and bureaucracy as far as the eye could see, because if you didn’t have bureaucracy you wouldn’t get anything done.

Randy Jokipii

There’s nothing like observing new things. I think most scientists feel that way, no matter what their field is. I can remember in 1969 I spent two weeks in Budapest. This was when the Iron Curtain was still strong.

People would just walk up to us in the streets and say, “Congratulations, Americans!” I still remember that. That was very riveting to them. I think part of it was a reaction to the Russians, because they were under the foot of the Russians at the time. But also it was partly that it was a very exciting time.

William Hartmann

I actually got to see Apollo 14 launched, which was very impressive. The big physical sensation is just that the low-frequency sound. You can actually feel it sort of hitting in and vibrating your stomach. That’s the sound the microphones can’t catch.

Charles Wood

On the wall of the Atmospheric Science Building there were posters for the International Geophysical Year, which was 1957-58, and one of those posters was the western half of the United States as seen by a rocket—one of the rockets that we had captured from the Germans with von Braun. We would launch from New Mexico to explore rockets and to explore space.

There was this fantastic picture that showed the curvature of the Earth, and showed New Mexico and Arizona and California and northern Mexico, and I saw that in the early sixties when we first got there. To me it was more spectacular of the picture we later saw from Apollo, because it was so much earlier.

William Hartmann

They had launched the first weather satellite, and here was this first picture of the cloud formations of Earth as seen from space. Those kinds of pictures really affected our view of our planet.

I’m a big fan of the early artistic renditions of the solar system. Chesley Bonestell was the father of astronomical art in the United States. He had seen the first V-2 pictures from New Mexico looking down, and New Mexico had a very specific kind of cloud pattern. There are lots of these little individual cumulus clouds, and they would actually cast a shadow. Bonestell would paint the Earth this way, with these little patchy clouds.

Nobody realized that these clouds were organized into these huge systems; these big cyclonic bands and spirals and so forth. People knew a hurricane was a spiral, but the early artists trying to understand what the Earth would look like from space didn’t sense the extent of it —they painted all the clouds as sort of separate little clouds because that’s what you could see from the V-2 photographs in New Mexico. So that first picture coming in from a weather satellite, and the idea that they were going to be able to track these systems, was an amazing thing to look to.

Robert Strom

The first picture of Earth from space was not taken by the astronauts. It was taken by the orbiter. It got the horizon, and there was the Earth. It was not in color, it was in black and white, but there was the Earth. That was the first picture of the Earth ever taken from a great distance. It was amazing.

Now the public really didn’t know about that photograph very much. But when the astronauts returned the first pictures of the Earth from the Moon—that was Apollo 8—it kind of shocked people. The reason it shocked people: Here was this little blue marble sitting there in black space, and you could hardly see the atmosphere. Then I think it dawned on people, wow, we live in a precarious environment, and the only thing separating us from death is this thin atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen.

Charles Sonett

There was one very interesting picture especially, taken from the Moon. You could see the oceans of the Earth, and the clouds. That’s something to think about. That’s worth contemplating.

Don McCarthy

You put a picture of the whole Earth from space in your class, and you ask the audience when they saw that. Young people cannot answer that. You cannot answer that, most likely, because you’ve grown up with it. Whereas people my age saw the transition, of being able to see part of the Earth to the whole Earth. It is speculated that that new view of the Earth as a whole from space inspired the whole environmental movement, and certainly has changed the way generations of people around the globe think of themselves as fitting into the universe. Not just one locale; now we think globally. What price do you put on a single picture that had that impact? It’s priceless.

Alan Binder

I don’t think it was so much seeing the Earth from the Moon: It was being on the Moon. Man was up there. You could look up, and people were up there. Because I had my telescope, I would look at the landing site and see the mountains and see the craters and I knew there were people down there. I could look in the window at the television and see those mountains. That was an amazing connection to me.