Lunar Orbiter became the first robotic probe designed to pave the way for human travel. NASA sent a series of five robots to orbit the Moon in 1966 and 1967 to search for landing sites. Engineers at Kodak equipped them with a clever mechanism to remotely transmit images taken on film. These images became the basis for new maps of unprecedented scope and detail.
The geoscientists went to work analysing the images, further altering their stories about the Moon’s history. But Kennedy’s deadline was rapidly approaching. NASA needed the geologists to focus on the selection of landing sites for the Apollo programme.
They used techniques that had roots in early topographical analysis to find flat spots that made for safe landing sites. And they used new geological narratives to find interesting sites that gave later Apollo missions more scientific value. The Egyptian American geologist Farouk El-Baz was one of the scientists who analysed Lunar Orbiter images for NASA. In his papers and the memoranda of the Apollo Site Selection Board, one can see, for the first time, theories of extraterrestrial geology being used to find destinations for practical human travel.
El-Baz and other geologists used the images from Lunar Orbiter to train the Apollo astronauts. They carefully studied the images, choosing landmarks that the astronauts could use to orient themselves once in orbit. The geologists of the USGS took the astronauts out to sites on Earth to prepare them for the work they would do on the Moon.
Some of the astronauts were not particularly interested in the geological work, or did not consider it an especially significant part of their mission. But, to the geoscientists, it was everything. The photographs and samples returned from the Apollo missions provided essential ‘ground truth’ that helped scientists test the geological theories developed using views from above. By the 1980s, they had incorporated what they had learned into a consensus theory about the Moon’s geological history.
In Placing Outer Space, Messeri discusses the frontier narrative that Apollo spawned. It was a story based on American westward expansion, and it captivated the political, scientific and popular audiences of the time. Shoemaker lamented that NASA abandoned a frontier-style project of scientific exploration after the Apollo programme. Messeri cautions against carrying that type of narrative forward into our new epoch of space exploration, and suggests that we should seek more cooperative and constructive visions of our relationship with outer space.