Moonstruck

Well, I did go to the talk by Harrison Schmitt, who, for those of you who don't know, was an astronaut on Apollo 17 and, as a geologist, has the distinction of being the first and only scientist to have set foot on the moon. It was a pretty cool talk. He brought lots of great slides and some video (most of which consisted of highly amusing footage of him bouncing around and falling over a lot in 1/6 gravity). He talked a lot about lunar geology, of course. I think the main reason he was here was to speak to geology students -- they got a more technical lecture before the general talk -- and I believe they made up most of the audience. On that subject, he mentioned that he disagrees with the current prevailing theory that the Moon was formed in the impact of a Mars-sized body with the Earth early in its history, believing instead that it is most likely a captured body, like the moons of Mars. He also says that there is a great deal of helium-3 to be found on the Moon, and that he's very optimistic about the possibility of privately-funded Moon missions to mine the isotope for use in fusion reactors. Of course, he also talked quite a bit about what the trip to the Moon was like (the food was good; the spacesuit gloves were extremely hard to work in). And he had lots of amusing Lunar anecdotes, like the accusation that CSM pilot Ron Evans ate all the good food in the command module while he and Cernan were on the surface, leaving them the salmon salad which, apparently, you can see a lot of in museums because nobody ever wanted to eat the stuff. ("Fish doesn't travel well in space.")

And, no, I didn't get his autograph. He did throw some lunar-cratered rubber balls into the audience which I think were autographed, but I didn't catch any.