Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan
Here, on the 12th of September 1959,
the young rocketeers of the Soviet space programme
were secretly preparing to launch a probe called Lunik 2
lts destination was the Moon
If it reached its goal,
this would be the first time man had touched another world
Just forty years ago, little was known about the Moon
What was it made of?
Did it harbour life?
And how did it come to be formed?
The answers came from the hostility of the Cold War
The race to the Moon was a showdown
between two superpowers intent on proving their supremacy
But it also became the greatest voyage of scientific discovery in history
It began with Lunik 2
The Soviets had mustered all their technical know-how to build the probe
But to score the propaganda coup of reaching the Moon first,
there was one thing they lacked
They had no means of tracking Lunik all the way -
no way to prove they'd really got there
This was the challenge that faced one of Lunik's chief engineers, Boris Chertok
The Soviets sent a covert message to Jodrell Bank,
near Manchester - the only place in the world
which could track a probe so far away in space
lts director was Bernard Lovell
To my astonishment I found on the telex machine a long message
from Moscow giving complete details not only of
the transmission frequencies of this Lunik but also its position,
calculated for the latitude and longitude of Jodrell Bank
And this of course was a clear indication
that we were meant to do something about it and so we sprang into action
We immediately found the 'bleep, bleep' of the Lunik
in exactly the position the Russians stated,
and this indicated that the Lunik was destined for the Moon
The impact was I recall I think
at two minutes twenty three seconds past ten o'clock
when Lunik hit the Moon and the signals suddenly ceased
There was of course an uproar from the press,
because it was realised that the Russians had achieved
a remarkable degree of technological expertise in doing this
The timing was perfect
A week later Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet premier to visit America
He took a replica of the Lunik probe with him
My father was so excited that he even told his assistant in the plane,
"What do you think if we present American President
with a copy of the probe on the first meeting in the airfield?"
And they told, "Mr Khrushchev,
you know that he will not be very happy with this present
and maybe it will be not so polite to do this on the first visit."
And my father told, "I will do this in the White House"
So when he first visited White House he brought this,
he told "Mr President, I want to give to you my best gift,
it is the copy of the probe which we sent to the Moon just recently
and I want you to have the copy of this because you still didn't do this!"
The Soviets had already shocked the world with Sputnik,
the first ever satellite
Now, they had reached the Moon
Their next probe, Lunik 3,
flew around it and sent back the first pictures of the dark side,
the side that always faces away from Earth
On April 12th 1961, the Soviets put their supremacy beyond doubt
Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space
Enough was enough
America's new President needed to make his own grand gesture
"For the eyes of the world now look into space,
to the Moon and the planets beyond,
and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed
by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace
We choose to go to the Moon, we choose to go the Moon,
we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,
not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Khrushchev had to decide whether to race the Americans to the Moon
He summoned his generals to a meeting at a secret location in Georgia
The meeting was captured on film by Khrushchev's son Sergei,
himself a rocket scientist
As I was Khrushchev's son,
nobody would tell me "Don't film this meeting"
But when I began to film the report of the Commander in Chief of the Navy,
all these military officials looked at me so negative that I stop it
Khrushchev supported the space achievement
but he was not ready to spend too much money
So it was long discussion, and at last Khrushchev told "Yes, let's go"
The race was on
Both sides began training their top fighter pilots for a mission to the Moon
For the scientists who were also recruited,
this was a unique chance to understand another world
Among them was geologist Farouk El-Baz
When I came here to the United States looking for a job
I was writing letters for application and my wife would type these letters
and I remember at that time we would sort something like a hundred
and twenty letters
And then I saw an ad in a magazine
and I wrote that application too and gave it to her,
it was late at night, and she said,
"What's this about?"
I said, "Well, it's a company doing something on the Moon with NASA
And she said, "Well, you don't know anything about the Moon!"
And I said, "Yes, but one more letter is not going to hurt!" -
and anyway, I convinced her, she wrote that letter,
and that was letter number 121, from which I got the first response
To scientists on both sides, the Moon suddenly seemed much closer
Geologists like Alexander Basilevsky had a new sense of purpose
Our group was selecting landing sites on the Moon
And it was very intensive work
We worked day and night, we looked on images,
we counted craters, we counted rocks
And engineers grabbed data from us, because they used this data for design,
for computer simulation of landing and so on
That was beautiful time, that was probably first time in my life
when something which I was doing was necessary to other people -
it was crucially necessary for them
At that time, what knowledge we had of
the Moon was fragmentary but tantalising
Telescopes had revealed bright highlands,
called mountains, and dark basins, called seas
There were round craters that looked like the tops of volcanoes
But how old it was, what it was made of,
or how it came to be - all this remained a mystery
Scientists hoped that samples of rock brought back
from the Moon would provide the answers
One of them was William Hartmann
In the early '60s there were three theories about
where the Moon might have come from
The first one was that the Earth and the Moon had just grown side by side,
had been close together the whole time
Then there was another theory
that well maybe the Moon had just formed in some entirely different place
in the solar system and later on it came in
and got captured into orbit around the Earth
So then there was a third theory
that maybe the Earth was spinning so fast that it spun the Moon off
The Moon just sort of flew off like a drop of water off a spinning ball
Discovering the origin of the Moon
became the stated scientific goal of the American lunar programme
The first fresh insights came from the missions to look
for landing sites for the astronauts
The Ranger probes were dispatched kamikaze-style,
sending back close-up pictures of the Moon as they smashed into its surface
The first images showed something that almost no-one had expected
and that is that at every scale the Moon was covered with craters -
not just the big craters
that astronomers had seen before and thought were volcanoes,
but smaller craters, craters everywhere, craters that couldn't possibly be volcanic
The only thing that could make craters and pits of all those different sizes
was probably meteors falling onto the lunar surface
and leaving their scars on the surface
Ranger transformed ideas about the Moon
This was a cold, lifeless world, battered by meteorites
But it still wasn't clear what it was made of,
or even if it was hard enough for a man to walk on
Then came the next Soviet triumph
Luna 9 touched down safely on firm ground
And the little probe had another surprise in store
When Luna 9 hit the Moon of course the signals ceased abruptly
and we thought that was the end of the affair
But to our astonishment the signals reappeared
And this was a facsimile transmission,
which in those days was used for transmitting photographs by newspapers
Well of course we had no facsimile machine
But fortunately it was the Daily Express who responded,
and immediately and sent out the necessary equipment
And to our utter amazement we saw with our eyes the astonishing thing,
actually rocks of the Moon appearing,
and these were the first pictures transmitted from the Moon
The pictures were rushed to press
The scoop of the century nearly caused an international incident
Next day was a big scandal in our newspapers
They say that Englishmen, they have stolen our pictures, our data
This British scientist grabbed our data
and then British media published our pictures before we did this
I was very angry...
The pictures showed in detail a surface
of shattered rock - a dead world
Meanwhile, Farouk El-Baz was training the first astronauts
who would walk on this world
They were fighter pilots, they had no training in geology,
so to get these pilots to think like geologists and behave like geologists,
we knew that we had to train them well
High in the volcanic mountains of Arizona,
a little piece of the Moon was recreated on Earth
This field of craters seen from the air,
precisely matches a view of the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon
My role was really to teach them how to make observations from orbit
For instance, right here at this crater site,
we would bring them to the field and so they can see it,
and then we'd take them in a Cessna aircraft close to the ground
and fly over it to see what they can see from orbit
And then we'd take them in a T-38 flying at 25,000 feet high
And with the T-38 it simulates the exact speed of the spacecraft over the Moon
Working with the astronauts we became very close friends,
and they gave me the name of King,
because my name is Farouk and I came from Egypt
and King Farouk had ruled Egypt not too long ago
So that became the nickname that they used during the missions
They would say "If the king's down there
tell him this and that" so it was really very nice
Alexander Basilevsky never worked so closely with the Soviet cosmonauts
Their training was done in the utmost secrecy
But every month,
he would travel to a secret base in the Crimea to work on another lunar project
Here the engineers were busy testing an eight-wheeled vehicle called Lunokhod
that could be driven remotely on the Moon
It's thirty years since Basilevsky first came here
First time I came here this area looked very different
There was no grass, it was just sand and rocks,
and everything mimicks lunar surface
This was so-called Lunadrome
The crew spent here hours and hours to train themselves
how to drive along lunar surface
They used to learn how to stop, how to move,
how to drive along these craters like this one
All this experience was very helpful for them
when they started to work in reality on the Moon
Next came Luna 10, the first probe to orbit the Moon
It beamed down the Internationale to the Party Congress
The Americans feared the next craft would carry a cosmonaut
But the Soviets were more cautious than they seemed
I had frequently asked my Soviet contacts
when they intended to send a human being to the Moon,
and their response was always,
"When we can be absolutely certain of getting them back alive."
And they did not believe that the Americans would do this,
and in fact it's clear the Americans did take considerable risk
"This transmission is coming to you approximately half-way
between the Moon and the Earth."
The Americans cut short their test flights and took a gamble
On Christmas Eve 1968, Apollo 8 carried the first men around the Moon
"All systems are go, Apollo 8."
"OK, Apollo 8 is go."
"You're riding the best bird we can find."
"We'll see you on the other side."
As they disappeared behind its edge, they lost all contact with Earth
Never before had humans been so isolated
"Apollo 8, Houston... Apollo 8, Houston... Apollo 8, Houston..."
"Apollo 8, over."
"Hello, Apollo 8, loud and clear."
"Roger. Please be informed there is a Santa Claus."
"You're the best ones to know."
It seemed that a manned landing was just a step away
For the first time,
the Americans had taken the initiative in the race to the Moon
Sergei Khrushchev can reveal that the race need not have been so hostile
President Kennedy twice approached my father
with idea to join efforts in the Moon
First time it was in June 1961 in Vienna,
and my father reject it because he thought it could hurt our military security
Then second time it was in autumn 1963
and my father was ready to accept this invitation
and he told it will be very important we will save money,
we will maybe gain politically and technically
So it was possible that it will be one American astronaut,
for example Neil Armstrong, on the Moon, and second will be Yuri Gagarin
But soon American President was assassinated
and new President never repeated invitation to the Moon
It was not long before Khrushchev himself was ousted
The two leaders
who had begun the race would play no part in the final drive for the Moon
The Soviets had one final hope of upstaging their rivals
They prepared Luna 15 - a robot that could land on the Moon,
scoop up soil and return it to Earth automatically
Perhaps they could solve the Moon's mysteries without risking any lives
The Soviets saw the opportunity of a great coup
in getting the rock back automatically, without endangering lives
After all, if the Americans had lost lives at that stage,
then the repercussions would be tremendous
"This is Apollo Saturn launch control
We have countdown for Apollo 11, the flight to land the first man on the Moon."
In July 1969, both sides prepared for lift-off
Luna 15 was first off the launch pad
"We have commit... We have lift-off
Just three days later, Apollo 11 joined the chase
Tower clear at 13 seconds."
Once again, Jodrell Bank was listening
We were tracking Luna 15
And to our surprise the signals abruptly ceased
and it became clear quite soon that this Lunik had crashed onto the lunar surface
Neil Armstrong: "I'm going to step off the LEM now
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
"Tell me if you've got a picture, Houston."
"You're going too fast on the panorama sweeps, you're going to have to stop."
"That's the first picture on the panorama"
When Luna 15 crashed on the Moon and we knew that Apollo 11 landed safely,
and they are bringing samples, it was a complicated feeling,
it was a mixture of jealousy and disappointment
But we still were very strong,
and we understand that we can do this the second time, the third time
But we were not the first
"Beautiful, beautiful. Ain't that something?"
"Magnificent desolation."
The astronauts began gathering samples of Moon rock to bring back to Earth
"Oh, that looks beautiful from here, Neil."
"We'll get to the details of what's around here,
but it looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape, angularity,
granularity, and every variety of rock you could find."
In the Soviet Union, the inquest into the Luna 15 failure had already begun
With most of the team away from Moscow,
one of the few people left was a scientist
who had made maps of the lunar surface, Natalya Bobina
Three men and their precious cargo of 21 kilos of Moon rock had returned to Earth
Scientists could hardly wait to get their hands on the samples
Geologist Harrison Schmitt was more impatient than most
He was one of six civilian scientists selected for astronaut training
Their hopes of flying to the Moon weren't high
But Schmitt had made understanding lunar geology his own personal crusade
It was an excruciating period,
actually having to wait in order to get your hands on the rocks
But it was a mixture of joy that we'd accomplished
what we'd set out to do and anticipation
because now we had something really to work on,
and begin that process of understanding the Moon, its ages,
how it formed, and what it meant to us here on Earth
The Moon rock was almost identical to the most basic kind of rock on Earth
It was basalt,
which forms when molten rock from inside a planet seeps through the surface,
then cools and solidifies
The first rocks turned out to be 3.9 billion years old
and that was older than most people had suspected
And so as we went through these really spectacular rocks, you know,
we were learning for the first time what the Moon was all about
Soon after, the Soviets' second attempt
at a moonscooper brought back a few grammes of soil
from a different part of the Moon
The early missions provided the first evidence
for scientists trying to understand how the Moon had formed
Had it grown alongside Earth, or been spun off by the young planet?
Or had it formed elsewhere and been captured by Earth's gravity?
When we got the rocks back from the Moon we saw that the isotopes of oxygen
in the lunar rocks were exactly the same as on the Earth
Now the reason this is important is that
we have meteorites from other parts of the solar system
and each other part of the solar system
has a different composition of these oxygen isotopes,
ratio of one type of isotope to the other
The Moon has exactly the same as the Earth
So that seemed to rule out the idea that the Moon had formed far away
and it made it much more plausible
that the Moon was something made out of the same material
that the Earth was made out of
But if the Moon was made from the same stuff as Earth,
there were still puzzling differences
Jay Melosh was one of a team of scientists struggling to make sense of it all
I think probably the most prominent thing about the lunar rocks is they're so dry,
there's not a single molecule of water as far as
we can tell in any of the lunar rocks
and that kind of amazing fact strongly supported the idea
that the Moon must have come from some place else
If it had been spun out early in the Earth's history
or had grown together with the Earth you'd expect it to have water in it
And yet other facts suggested
that the Moon could not possibly have come from somewhere else
That kind of conflict among facts was
what led the scientists to be very confused at that time
about the origin of the moon
Scientists weren't helped by the fact
that all the rocks found so far were basalt
rock that had once been molten
and flowed through cracks in the Moon's ancient surface
No astronaut had yet found a piece of
that original surface itself - primordial Moon rock,
that might cast new light on the Moon's formation
If ever a geologist was needed on the Moon, it was now
Apollo 15 was billed as the big science mission
I was assigned to a back-up crew for Apollo 15
And that began a process
that looked like I might have a chance to go to the Moon
But soon after that missions began to be cancelled
Apollo 20 was cancelled, then 19
And then Apollo 18 was cancelled...
so it began to look like the chances were getting small
And so my anticipation of flying a mission was not very great at that time
Apollo 15's goal was to find a piece of the Moon's original surface
Scientists predicted it would be paler than the basalt,
and made of larger crystals
"Oh boy, it's beautiful out here."
"Look at that Rille!"
"There's some beautiful geology out here."
Hadley Rille - a gigantic canyon a mile wide.
"Jim, why don't you hop on if you can
Let me get your seatbelt. We gotta get moving."
"Oh, look at this baby climb the hill."
"Oh boy, this is travelling."
Astronauts Scott and Irwin travelled farther afield than anyone else
"I can't believe we came over those mountains."
"Hey, we did. This is a beautiful little valley."
"Yeah, those are pretty big mountains to fly over."
They set to their task of finding a piece of
the moon's original surface
"Oh man, I've got... Iook at that, look at the glint
I can almost see twinning in there
Guess what we just found! Guess what we just found!
I think we found what we came for! Crystalline rock! Yes, sir!"
"Joe, I think this crater is a goldmine!"
"And there might be diamonds in the next."
Scott and Irwin had found a piece of rock sparkling with mineral crystals
Can I with the picture
It was as old as the Earth - four and a half billion years
It came to be known as the Genesis Rock
It was not basalt but anorthosite - a much more complex rock
Geologists knew that the only way this rock could have formed was
if the Moon had once been completely molten
But a body as small and cold as our Moon should never have been that hot
The Moon's birth grew ever more puzzling
But the Genesis Rock was almost overshadowed by another discovery
From orbit, Al Worden spotted
what looked like cinder cones - the tops of volcanoes
"OK, I'm looking right down on Littrow now at a very interesting thing
It looks like a whole field of cinder cones down here."
He had absorbed my instruction and all of the training and he said
"Hey, tell the King, I see a whole field of cinder cones",
so he wanted to let me know
And his observation from orbit resulted in the selection of the Apollo 17 site
and that is the real proof that observations
by an astronaut could make a real difference
If these were fresh volcanoes,
could it be that the Moon was still an active world?
Apollo 17 was the final mission
On board was Harrison Schmitt - the only scientist ever to fly to the Moon
"Challenger, you are go for landing."
"Feels good. Stand by for touchdown...
Stand by...
Down in 2...
Feels good...
20 feet...
Going down in 2...
Ten feet...
Ten feet... contact!"
He landed in the Taurus Littrow Valley -
the site of the cinder cones spotted by Apollo 15
The beauty of the place was certainly not lost on me
But once you're there,
you sort of slip into the mode of being a field geologist
and it's your profession and you've got three days to practise
it in this very remarkable location, beautiful location
And so you go at it
On their second field trip,
Schmitt and Cernan made their way to a crater called Shorty
It was five kilometres from base,
and they were running dangerously short of time
"Guys, we don't have that much time."
"I know Bob, I know"
By the time we arrived at Shorty we knew it was going to be a short stop
Half an hour really is all we had because of our oxygen supply
"That's twenty nine and a half minutes from now
but remember they left that site a little bit late."
We had anticipated though that we might see something exciting
there in the event that this was really a volcanic crater
So I headed over to the edge of the crater
and on the way I scuffed up some orange-looking material at my feet
and that was when the whole excitement started
"Oh hey, there is orange soil!"
"It's all over!"
"That's a volcanic vent."
"It is - I can see it from here. It's orange!"
The orange soil looked like evidence of recent volcanic activity,
a find that could challenge everything
the earlier missions had discovered about the Moon
"I gotta dig a trench, Houston
Fantastic, sports fans - it's trench time!"
In just half an hour,
Schmitt and Cernan gathered all the orange soil they could lay hands on
"How can there be orange soil on the Moon?"
"They gotta leave at a certain time regardless of what they've got."
"There isn't enough time no matter which way you do it, we need more time."
"Jim, you better make it clear to Parker we've got to pull out."
"We'd like you to leave immediately."
"OK. My golly, this time goes fast!"
"Three... two... one... ignition
We're on our way, Houston."
These were the last men to walk on the Moon
We had a nearly full Moon receding fairly quickly from us...
but still with a several hours that one could look back
and really start to think of what we'd done
That was probably the most emotional time for me,
and I felt really choked up about that
The orange soil did indeed turn out to be a volcanic jet - but it was ancient
It seemed that the Moon had been inactive for billions of years
Lunar exploration was not quite over
For a year after the Americans had gone,
a Soviet Lunokhod rover was roaming the surface,
revealing thousands of landscapes never seen by man
Finally, it started to overheat
I told to bosses, "OK, tomorrow morning Lunokhod will die
But let's die as we say in Russian with music
Let's go not along the smooth surface, but let's go to nearby mountains."
We were afraid to go there becasue of risk of this very dangerous surface
But I was rejected -
"No, no, we should not risk." So we died without music
None of the missions had provided a blueprint for the Moon's formation
But they had shown that it was as old as the Earth
It was made of the same rock,
but it had no water, and it had once been completely molten
What could explain all these facts together?
By the early 1970's fresh ideas were emerging
about the origins of all the planets
The early solar system was thought to be a violent place,
with many bodies growing rapidly and competing for space
These new theories led William Hartmann to look again
at the evidence from the lunar missions
He came up with an intriguing idea for the Moon's origin
When the Earth was forming
it wasn't the only object at that distance from the Sun
And the second biggest one actually got very big,
and eventually fairly late in the process
when the Earth was partly grown crashed into the Earth
and blew a lot of material out of the Earth
So the Moon then grew from that debris swarm around the Earth
Hartmann suggested that in its early history the Earth
had crossed paths with a world the size of Mars
Somehow, Earth survived the collision
The swirling mass of debris coalesced to form the Moon
To many scientists, Hartmann's idea seemed almost too far-fetched to believe
When I first heard about this theory
that Bill Hartmann had put forward my first reaction was almost shock,
I didn't believe it
I was pretty sure that in a weekend I could do a few calculations
and show that what they had proposed simply couldn't work
In fact it took work with the biggest military computers to try
to fill out the holes in this theory and begin to realise
that really it could work after all
The more people considered it,
the more Hartmann's theory seemed to fit all the known facts about the Moon
It was born from the Earth, so its rocks would be the same
The heat of the collision explained why the Moon was once entirely molten
and any water in its rocks had vaporised
It is now a quarter of a century since we left the Moon
Since then, probes have flown to the outermost reaches of the solar system,
to the giant planets and their moons
They showed that ours was not the only moon to have had a violent birth
At Uranus, Miranda's bizarre patchwork surface suggests
that this little moon was blasted apart, then re-formed,
and settled back into orbit around the planet
And perhaps the rings of Saturn were once a moon
which collided with another body and shattered,
the debris remaining suspended as an array of rings
Everywhere in the solar system, there seemed to be evidence of violent origins
You get a system of planets where they all have fairly regular properties,
they're all going around the Sun in the same direction
But superimposed on these regular properties are bizarre strange properties
I mean one will have a big ring system, another'll have a big satellite,
another will be tilted over, because of these few big impacts
that happen down through the sequence of formation
The journey to the Moon not only revealed the turbulent past of Earth
and its companion world
It also transformed our view of the planet beyond
Going to the Moon has lifted us all of us
It lifted humanity out of the bounds of the Earth
We realised that human beings can leave the Earth
and explore some other planetary body
And in many ways what we learned about the Moon
we took to Mars and Venus and Jupiter and the other planets in the solar system
And it really was the stepping stone for human beings to follow their vision
and their imagination and begin to explore the whole Universe around us