The Sundarban
Apollo astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt talks about having to acclimate to gravity after his moon mission in 1972 while being interviewed at the Contemporary Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, N.M., on April 22, 2026.
Susan Montoya Bryan/AP
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — It turned into once 1972 and Apollo astronauts Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Eugene Cernan had excellent stepped onto the moon’s ground to begin collecting rock and soil samples.
The mission would mark the finish of an era for the American home program, nonetheless Schmitt already turned into once looking to the future. His bid crackling over a high-frequency radio signal that day, he shared his thoughts with Cernan and those listening in at Mission Sustain watch over.
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“Successfully, I command you Gene, I think the next era ought to obtain this as a scenario. Let’s examine them hurry away footsteps relish these one day,” Schmitt acknowledged.
Schmitt, 90, is certainly one of the four Apollo moonwalkers gentle alive today. A field geologist, he turned into once the first scientist to keep foot on the moon and his expertise helped answer questions about the origin of that sizable rock up there and what it tells us about the photo voltaic design.
Schmitt felt the thrill again when the Artemis II crew rocketed into home on a historic lunar flyby. Pure pleasure and the skill for therefore noteworthy extra. And he’s hopeful as unique generations rating back to the moon and beyond.
Interviewed by The Associated Press, the used U.S. senator from Contemporary Mexico spoke about everything from the significance of having a lunar detrimental to tapping unique energy sources and whether we’re by myself in the universe. Darkish topic and quantum entanglement even maintain been talked about, with Schmitt saying many discoveries are but to come.
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“You’ve excellent obtained to keep in mind,” he said, “what used to be called supernatural probably should be called unknown physics.”
This interview has been edited for brevity.
Q: What about having a lunar base?
Well, I think a lunar base makes a lot of sense and it always has for a lot of reasons. One is geopolitical. Probably the most important one is a geopolitical presence in deep space — and in preparation for going on to Mars.
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The moon has resources that are going to reduce the cost of actually going to Mars and it gains experience. One of the things people keep forgetting about is you’ve gone through several generations and the new generation has to gain experience — psychologically as well as practically about how you work in deep space. And they’re doing that. That was probably the most important part of Artemis II, is it gave the ground people, Mission Control and others, the experience now to really have the risk as real rather than as part of a simulation.
Q: What was your mission during Apollo 17?
I had a lot of understanding of what other crews had learned, what had been learned from some of the early sample analyses and so we were trying to put sort of the frosting on the cake of answering questions in a very complex geologic area called Taurus-Littrow.
Taurus-Littrow actually is deeper than the Grand Canyon and so it has a three-dimensional aspect to it that we hadn’t had on other missions. And plus having a field geologist like myself on board meant that we should be more efficient at gathering samples that had a meaningful aspect to our further understanding of the origin of the moon, its relationship to the Earth and, it turns out, also its relationship to the history of the sun.
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Q: So we’re building upon our knowledge of the universe around us?
Well there’s no question that the moon has a history to tell us.
It’s been recording the history of the solar system ever since the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. That is really what the moon gives us — that library of knowledge, of potential knowledge about how the solar system evolved and then what the sun has been doing in that 4.5 billion years.
In the recent work that I’ve been doing in that layer of debris, the regolith, we find that the sun became even more active than it had been about the same time as we had an explosion of life in the oceans on Earth, and so the oceans may have been and almost certainly were warming to that more active sun and life likes warmth. So it multiplied not only in quantity but in diversity. The mammals started to appear soon after that, life started to move up onto the continents that had formed so things were really starting to move about a half-billion years ago.
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Q: Tell us about the moon rocks
This is a sample of a basalt lava and we have a lot of basalt lavas here in New Mexico. This is different in that it is rich in titanium, more rich than most terrestrial basalts. And that titanium turns out to be very important in terms of the resources that are available on the moon. It has a property of concentrating some of those resources, particularly hydrogen and helium.
There’s an isotope called helium-3 and that is going to be, I think, ultimately very, very important in the production of energy. It’s going to be extremely useful in quantum computing, in cancer therapy and other things here on Earth. We just don’t have much on Earth, so the moon is going to be a our reservoir, our source of this very important isotope of helium-3.
Q: How important will this isotope be in the future?
