Lessons of Apollo

**Pat Ryan** (0:00)
Houston, We Have a Podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. This is episode 113, Lessons of Apollo. I'm Pat Ryan. On this podcast, we talk with scientists, engineers, astronauts and other folks to get the story about what's going on in America's space exploration program, especially with the Artemis program and our renewed effort to return American astronauts to the moon. The Apollo program started in the 1960s with a very specific goal and a deadline, putting astronauts on the moon and returning them to Earth before the end of that decade. Well, likewise, NASA's Artemis program today is working to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, to explore with new technologies and systems, and to collaborate with commercial and international partners to establish a sustainable presence there that will prepare us to go on to Mars. We're talking about Artemis a lot on the podcast, including today's conversation with a man who knows a lot about the moon as a destination and about the history of exploration efforts to get there, science journalist and Apollo historian, Andrew chaikin. His 1994 book, A Man on the Moon, detailed all of the Apollo missions, and it was the basis for the 1998 Emmy-winning HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. chaikin started his career as an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the NASA Viking program that sent two probes to Mars, and he's worked as a journalist in books, magazines, and all manner of publications for some 40 years. chaikin was here in Houston recently as a visiting instructor in the JSC Academy of Engineering. He was here to give a presentation about using the lessons of Apollo to be successful in our effort to return to the Moon. And I got a chance to go into that with him, as well as talk about his career path, the reasons the Moon is a desirable object of exploration, and get his thoughts about the Artemis program efforts to return American astronauts to the Moon in just a few years. And it wasn't hard to get him to open up. Okay then, here we go.
You are of an age to remember Apollo 11, as am I. Was that key for you, or was there something else that got you interested originally in human space flight and putting people on other heavenly bodies?

**Andrew Chaikin** (2:51)
Well, my interest goes back to a much earlier time. I mean, I was 13 at the time of Apollo 11, but I can remember being five years old and just being absolutely mesmerized with my childhood astronomy books and the pictures in those books, which, you know, this is 1961 Hardly anybody had even been in space, but they had predictions, they had forecasts, they had beautiful illustrations of people on the moon, people on one of the moons of Mars, people floating in a spaceship beyond Jupiter. All of those things were part of my landscape, my mental imaginary landscape when I was five years old and I was completely just absolutely consumed with other worlds and the idea of visiting them.

**Pat Ryan** (3:43)
A lot of people got excited about going to space from the Apollo program, but unlike many of those people, you stuck with the science thing. Fill us in on your background and how your career became what it became.

**Andrew Chaikin** (3:59)
Well, I'm probably like the mass major fraction of everybody here in that I wanted to be an astronaut.

**Pat Ryan** (4:07)
Sure.

**Andrew Chaikin** (4:08)
That was my dream. I realized though that because of my less than perfect medical history, that was never going to happen. But the other thing that grabbed me was the geology of the moon, the geology of Mars. That was something I picked up in high school watching the Apollo missions, the scientists who were being interviewed for the coverage of the moon walks.
And so when I went to college, I studied geology. And but I had another kind of identity crisis at that point because I realized as much as I love the subject, I realized that I didn't want to be a scientist. So I actually had a couple of years after graduating from Brown University. And that was a fabulous experience because I had taken part in the first Mars landing as an intern. And my professors had helped train the Apollo astronauts. And so I was really deeply...

**Pat Ryan** (5:03)
And you still didn't want to be a scientist?

**Andrew Chaikin** (5:05)
Well, I realized...
Well, because I have always had this sort of right brain, left brain kind of coexistence thing going on in my head. And I was, as I mentioned, the thing that drew me in was the pictures. The thing that drew me in was the imagination. And I loved the science, but I just realized that that wasn't what I wanted to do day to day. And it was only a couple years after college that I kind of backed my way into journalism and writing about space at a magazine called Sky and Telescope, which is the Bible, a monthly Bible for amateur astronomers, and I had been a subscriber. Once I started that, and I found myself interviewing people like Gene Kranz, people like shuttle astronauts, getting the inside experience of space flight, that really turned me on, and it's just been a perfect fit for me.