Gary E. Lofgren
Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
Houston, Texas – 22 April 2009

Ross-Nazzal: Today is April 22nd, 2009. This interview with Dr. Gary Lofgren is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in Houston. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, and she is assisted by Rebecca Wright. Thanks again for joining us this afternoon. We appreciate it.

Lofgren: You’re welcome.

Ross-Nazzal: I know your schedule is busy. I thought we’d begin today by asking about your interest in science as a child.

Lofgren: One of the interesting things that I remember, it probably stands out. When I family moved from Minnesota to California, my dad was following the jobs right after the Korean War. On the way, we drove and went through the Badlands in South Dakota, through Yellowstone, et cetera. I started collecting rocks the whole way. I think my life was preordained from that moment. I was going to be a geologist. I didn’t know that at that time, but it’s a funny story. I did that as a 12 year old, and then in high school I remember in the senior English class we had to write a paper on a career. One of the term papers was on a career. You go to the library, you look through all these pamphlets. I saw a pamphlet on geology. I said, “Hm.” Opened it up. Here’s a guy riding horseback through the mountains. I thought, “Ah, that’s cool.” So I wrote it about that.

Then I got a scholarship to Stanford [University, Stanford, California], and I was sitting in an auditorium. They were telling all us freshmen that you can choose a major now, or you can become general studies, or it’s up to you. If you have a major, go ahead, and declare it. You can always change. So I thought, “Hm.” I wrote geology in there. I’ve been a geologist ever since.

Ross-Nazzal: It just kind of stuck.

Lofgren: I never anticipated going on for a PhD. I just wound up going that way. The concept of research really interested me, and geology fascinated me. So that’s where I wound up.

Ross-Nazzal: Was there any focus that you were particularly interested in once you started graduate school?

Lofgren: Yes. I went to Dartmouth [College, Hanover, New Hampshire] for a master’s degree, and then came back to Stanford for my doctorate. I got involved with a very interesting fellow at Dartmouth who was studying, of all things, the crystallization of sea ice. My tenure at Dartmouth, I was a research associate for this person, Willy [Wilford F.] Weeks. So I got involved in this. My project, which I turned into a master’s thesis, which is what you usually do, was to understand how sea ice crystallizes. Sea ice does a particular thing when it crystallizes. It incorporates some of the brine, some of the salt in the seawater into the ice, but not actually into the crystal structure, because the ice itself will just reject all other foreign substances. It crystallizes as a very pure thing, but it would trap bubbles of concentrated brine from the sea ice. Depending on how fast it grows, it traps more or less of that brine. That has direct relationship to its strength.

What they were trying to determine—I was working for this Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, which is US Army Materiel Command Study of Cold Regions. They wanted to know if they could land an airplane on a sea ice shelf just knowing what the weather conditions were prior to that, and not actually going down there and measuring the strength. So I wound up being part of that project to determine that.

That got me interested in studying crystallization in general. I started applying that to rocks and how rocks crystallize. I was really interested in that aspect of geology, the detective story part rather than—some people study phase diagrams or things like that. I just wasn’t interested in that aspect.

Then I came here, and built a laboratory, and continued to do that on lunar samples and meteorites. That’s been my primary research focus while I’ve been here at Space Center.

Ross-Nazzal: When you were pursuing your PhD at Stanford, were you working with anyone who was attached with MSC [Manned Spacecraft Center] at that point?

Lofgren: No. I had very little knowledge of the space program. Although, interestingly enough, again as a term paper, this was in history current-events type of thing, I wrote a paper on the Sputnik and then our first satellite. Although not at that time did I have an interest in the space program. That was just an interesting thing that interested me at the time.

My connection to the space program came as an opportunity. Jack [Harrison H.] Schmitt the astronaut was a good friend of my thesis adviser. [He] was invited to Stanford to give a lecture in this invited lecture series, and he gave a lecture about the Moon and doing geology on the Moon. This was early ’68, like February. At the end of the lecture he said, “NASA is hiring geologists.” At that time, geologist jobs were pretty scarce when I was graduating. I had one interview, and it didn’t work out. So I sent a letter off to NASA, and they invited me down for an interview. Wound up hiring me, and were going to allow me to build this laboratory I wanted to build to study the crystallization of rocks. But I very quickly was put into a group that was getting ready to study lunar samples and were also training astronauts. I had had a lot of field geology even though I had done an experimental type thesis. I had done a lot of field geology at Stanford. So they incorporated me into their group that was supporting the training of astronauts.

So that became something I did for about three years there as I was building this laboratory. I spent a lot of time in training. That turned out to be an incredibly rewarding experience and something that I really found worthwhile and a lot of fun. Obviously, I was part of a large group of people who were training astronauts. It included people like Lee [Leon T.] Silver and Bill [William R.] Muehlberger and Gordy [Gordon A.] Swann. I worked mostly on the Apollo 15 mission, but I did do work with all the [Apollo] 13-17. I worked with all the crews a little bit.

Ross-Nazzal: Well, let’s talk about it, since you mentioned training the crews. I understand you started first with a backup crew, with John [W.] Young and Charlie [Charles M.] Duke for Apollo 13.

Lofgren: Yes. The first time I got tapped to with the 13 crew. We had a trip to Hawaii, which sounds like a great place to go, and it is of course, but it’s got some of the best exposed volcanic geology in the world. So it really is a good place to work with astronauts, because the rocks on the surface are very fresh and easy to see and easy to describe. It’s a very good place to do training.

I was working with several of the guys here at MSC at the time, and so I went out with them. They needed somebody to work with. At this point we had started to do very mission-oriented training. We had the crews lined up as they were going to go to the Moon. [James A.] Lovell and [Fred W.] Haise were the prime crew. They were trained as a team. I was working with Young and Duke, and they were being trained as a team as the backup. We were planning traverses very much like they would do on the Moon. They were doing sample collection in the way that they would do it on the Moon, trying to get ready to learn how to do that.

We became far more sophisticated in the paraphernalia we had to help train astronauts by the time we got to the 15 mission. I can talk about how that improved. But yes, my first experience was working primarily with John and Charlie. They were a fun couple of guys to work with. Pressure was a little less on the backup crew than the prime crew to get ready. So everybody’d have a little more fun. But they really enjoyed learning the geology. They were very attentive and receptive to learning what was going on.

Ross-Nazzal: Would you tell us how you came up with planning those traverses and what went into that?

Lofgren: Other people before me had developed the ideas. The concept, though, was you’re going to the Moon. You’re going to be at a certain area for four hours. So as a geologist, you’d do your photogeology of the site, the best photos that we had. You would know about where you’re going to land, or where your landing target was anyway. So you would go to that area and you would choose interesting geologic features that you could see on the surface. You’d draw a circle around how far they could go. So this is the area that they can move around in. They couldn’t get farther from the LM [Lunar Module] than a certain distance, and that sort of thing. So you would pick interesting points, and then you would just say, “Okay, well, we want to collect samples, we want to get samples of the soil, we want some rocks. This looks like an interesting place to do that.” We picked three or four places where they could do that hopefully in two hours walking around. They didn’t have any vehicle at that time. That didn’t happen until Apollo 15.

The amount of area that they could traverse was pretty small. We would pick out spots, and then we would tell them to collect the kinds of samples that were obvious to collect at that site: collect a sample of the soil and a sample of the rocks. We’d already had some rocks back already. [Apollo] 13 was going to go where [Apollo] 14 wound up going, the Descartes area. We suspected that was volcanic. Didn’t turn out to be quite right, but we were learning a lot about the impacts that were occurring on the Moon that we didn’t really understand very well before we went. A lot more of the surface of the Moon is controlled by large impacts than by volcanism, although there is a significant amount of volcanism. The impacts play a huge role, bigger than we thought.

But that didn’t really make any difference. The idea that we were trying to do with the crews was just to let them practice solving geologic problems. You got a station, you’re going to go there. You want to make good observations. See what there is there to see and describe it. Then look around and collect a typical rock and maybe a couple of typical rocks. Then if there’s an unusual one, you might get one of those. You don’t want to focus on all the unusual ones, that’s not the game. You want to get what’s typical first. That’s probably the hardest thing to teach. You wanted to figure out what’s typical and get that first, even though some unusual ones might stand out, but you want to get those too.

So we were just teaching them a sampling philosophy. How to roughly identify different kinds of rocks. They weren’t geologists, but very bright guys, and they could learn very quickly. That’s something I picked up on real quick. These were smart guys and willing to learn and were very teachable.

I guess I went on a couple of trips with 13. There weren’t very many. The time period where we started to get to work with the crews was pretty short after they were named and when they were going to fly. So I was on a couple of trips with them.

Then the 13 mission had its problem and didn’t get to the lunar surface. I didn’t wind up working with 14 very much. In fact, I don’t think I went on a single trip with 14. But we got a new boss came in to work at the Space Center who was quite a prominent scientist. He came in to head up the geology group. He was already, at age 40, a member of the National Academy, which is quite an honor.

Ross-Nazzal: Who was that?

Lofgren: That’s Paul [W.] Gast. Unfortunately, he died of cancer about three years after he got there. In one of his routine physicals that they do for us here, they found a spot in his lung. He died like two years later. It was really sad because he was a really bright guy.

But anyway, he was the one that assigned me. He said, “I want you to be my eyes and ears for training Apollo 15.” I thought, “Whoa, this sounds kind of neat.” Gordy Swann was the USGS [United States Geological Survey] lead for Apollo 15. I was imposed upon their team. They looked at me like, “Who’s this guy from the Space Center? Does he know anything? Is he just going to be somebody, a klutz, we have to deal with or is he actually going to be useful?” I had enough field geology. I showed them quick enough that I was actually going to be useful, that I could help out.

Lee Silver played a very prominent role with Apollo 15. I had had the experience of working with two very fine field geology professors at Stanford. They have two really good ones. But Lee Silver was every bit as good or better at doing that and was a very impressive guy as a teacher of geology in the field and how to bring out students and get them interested.

Lee had already had a week where he had gone with the crew to the Orocopia Mountains in southern California. It’s in the desert sort of in eastern California. He went out there with the prime crew and the backup crews, Dave [David R.] Scott and Jim [James] Irwin and then Dick [Richard F.] Gordon and Jack Schmitt, the backup crews. He was out there with them for a week and that really got them started. Dave Scott was a very motivated guy, and he knew he was going to be on the lunar surface for three long EVAs [Extravehicular Activity]. He understood that he had to know what was going on. He had to have some geologic background, or he was going to look silly. So he was really dedicated to doing this and learning.

I was a rookie there, I didn’t set this up, but between Lee Silver and Gordy Swann and Jack Schmitt, they said, “Okay, we’re going to do a field trip a month. We’re going to be using astronaut time a couple days, maybe three or four days each month.” We set up those trips, and I got involved after the first couple. Basically went on every trip after that and became part of the team. It was a team of about 25 people. Not everybody went on a given trip. We might only have 8 or 10 guys on a given trip, but the USGS pool of guys was at least 15 or so people. I can’t remember the number exactly, but it seems like that many; that may be a large number.

We would do the same thing we did on 13, only we had more time to do it, obviously. We were going to have like 20 months to do this. We were going to run like before the launch, so we ran like 18 field trips compared to like 3 or 4 for 13, and 14 had 5 or 6. This was a real quantum jump in the amount of training that they were going to get. We probably wouldn’t have gotten that many trips except Dave Scott insisted on it. He told his schedulers back home that he was going to do this once a month and that was that. They could work all the other training he needed around that. I’m sure we wouldn’t have gotten that kind of time with the crews had not the commander really wanted to do that. So that was evidence of his dedication to doing this.

These field trips were really hard work. That’s the thing that really impressed me. We would routinely have 14- to 16-hour days. You’re up at the crack of dawn. You’re out in the field by 7:00 a.m. You may not get back to the hotel till 7:00 p.m., then you have dinner, then you have another debriefing before you go to bed. So these were long hard days. We would do two, maybe three of those. Usually a couple of those days is all we would do. Then they obviously had travel time to get there and go home.

Except for Hawaii, we were actually out in Hawaii for I think nine or ten days. We ran like three hard days, then we gave the crew a couple days off, and then we ran three more hard days. That was fantastic. That was the trip that turned the corner. They really got good out there, and that was halfway through the training. But we went to a variety of areas.

Apollo 15 was the first mission that was going to go to a much more complex site. The geology we had was at the edge of this big Imbrium Basin, which was a 1,500-kilometer-diameter basin. I think, somewhere in that ballpark. We were going to be landing on the basaltic volcanic rocks that dominated the center of the crater, but we were right next to the mountains at the rim. This was the first chance we were going to have to collect primitive lunar crust. So far, we hadn’t really done that. We knew it existed. This was the first time we dared land close to the mountains, that the mission controllers, mission people said, “Okay, we’ve got really good with this landing thing now. I think we can land near a mountain.” That was a big deal, because we came over Hadley Mountain, which was pretty high. I forget exactly how high it was above the mare, but about 11,000 feet, and then plopped down right on the other side of it. Then there was a big little less than one-and-a-half-kilometer-wide valley bounding the other side. It was a rille. We think they’re a volcanic feature, but it’s still a little open to question. They’re probably basically a volcanic feature related to the lava flows, but it’s sometimes hard to tell for sure.

So they had to land in this area in between the mountains and the Rille. They had to come over that mountain and plop it right down, which they were able to do. They landed very close to their target place. Let’s see. We had two fundamental objectives, which were looking at the volcanic rocks and collecting the pristine primitive lunar crust, the first part of the lunar crust that formed.

In the training, we went to two kinds of sites. We went to volcanic sites like Hawaii and a couple of others. But we also went to sites where they would see the kinds of rocks we expected to find as part of that primitive crust. That’s a rock more akin to—people think of granite as a rock that crystallizes deep in the Earth. Well, it’s not the technical granite that the geologist thinks of, which has compositional implications. This is a rock that is all particularly one kind of feldspar. It’s an anorthosite, which is rich in a calcium aluminum feldspar called plagioclase or anorthite. We went to places where they could look at those kinds of rocks. There was a place in southern California in San Gabriel Mountains. There was a place in northern Minnesota. There’s a big complex of anorthosites there. In the San Juan Mountains in Colorado we looked. They weren’t anorthosites, but they were granitic plutonic type rocks. We wanted them just to have seen some of those kinds of rocks, because we were hoping that they would get a chance to sample them.

Sure enough, actually they did. People have probably heard of the Genesis Rock. That’s the one they found that really was part of that primitive crust. What was rewarding was that Dave recognized what it was immediately when he saw it. He picked it up and looked at it and said, “Well, I can see the twinning in this feldspar. I know what this is. This is what we came for.” Some comment like that in the transcript. So everybody was all excited about that. They did an excellent job of sampling.

The things we tried to accomplish in the training were to teach them to be good observers of the geologic landscape. These are guys that are trained test pilots, they’re trained to know what’s going on around them, to observe what’s going on around them. But looking at the rocks and looking at the landscape is a little different thing than they were used to looking at. So we had to teach them how to do that in some kind of systematic way, how to describe it, and also to help them develop a vocabulary that the geologists had in common with them.

Our technique was not to try and change their vocabulary too very much or to give them the full technical vocabulary that a geoscientist would use, but to learn the way they described things. They picked up a bunch of geologic terms over the 18 months they were training, but we made no great effort to insist that they learn all the technical terms for what they were describing. Just let them do it and let them get used to doing it and let them get good at it. Then we would learn the words that they would use and what they mean.

I’ll explain in a minute how we did that. So that was a prime thing to teach them, to develop a vocabulary for describing what they were seeing, and to develop that common vocabulary with the scientists. The technique we used I think was really quite good. It did evolve and get better over time. But we would make up these traverses like we did on 13. They were more extensive now, because we knew that they were going to go out on the surface for like eight hours. So we didn’t plan an eight-hour traverse, because we couldn’t get all that done in a day and do a debriefing as well. But we would plan a four-to-five-hour traverse with several stations. We would set it up very much like it was going to work on the Moon.

We would have the crew going out and collecting rocks. We would have them set up with radios. They would be talking to a couple of geologists who could not see what they were seeing. They were sitting in the “science back room” someplace back near the base of where we started. We also had the CapCom out there, the guy who would be the real-time CapCom fo