Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [163]
Practice makes perfect, and no doubt Armstrong’s hundreds of hours flying experimental aircraft like the X-15 rocket ship—in dangerous and often death-defying scenarios—helped prepare him for piloting a safe landing on the moon. As with most seminal U.S. government accomplishments, particularly those involving science, it took thousands of men working hundreds of thousands of hours inside scores of research centers and test facilities—not to mention a number of chemical rockets designed by Wernher Von Braun—to get the Apollo 11 astronauts and five additional crews (Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the moon and back home. A little-known fact is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site. There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain. The Atomic Energy Commission’s Ernie Williams was their guide.
“I spent three days with the astronauts in Areas 7, 9, and 10 during astronaut training, several years before they went to the moon,” Williams recalls. In the 1960s, astronauts had rock-star status, and Williams remembered the event like it was yesterday. “The astronauts had coveralls and wore field packs, mock-ups of the real thing, strapped on their backs. They had cameras mounted on their hats and they took turns walking up and down the subsidence craters. It was steep, rocky terrain,” he explains. Williams originally worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in feeding and housing, making sure the “feed wagon” got to remote areas of the atomic bombing range. “We’d get mashed potatoes and gravy to the faraway places inside the test site,” Williams says, “hot food being a key to morale.” But the multitalented Williams quickly became the test site’s jack-of-all-trades, including astronaut guide. His other jobs included being in charge of the motor pool and helping CIA engineers drill for Area 51’s first water well. But for Williams, the highlight of his career was escorting the first men on the moon inside the atomic craters.
“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,” Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to test what it might be like driving on the moon. The astronauts were taken out to the Schooner crater, located on the Pahute Mesa in Area 20. “We picked them up at the Pahute airstrip and took them and the vehicle into the crater where there was pretty rough terrain,” Williams explains. “Some boulders out there were ten feet tall. One of the astronauts said, ‘If we encounter this kind of thing on the moon, we’re not going to get very far.’” Williams recalls the astronauts learning how to fix a flat tire on the moon. “They took off a steel tire and put on a rubber one” out in the field.
The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,” Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters, the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain. The astronauts also did a lot of walking out there,” Williams adds. One of the requirements of the Apollo astronauts who would be driving during moon missions was that they had to be able to walk back to the lunar module if the rover failed.
The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters—geologic by-products of underground bomb tests. When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once that molten rock cools,