A little-known fact, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), is that to prepare for what it would actually be like to walk around on the geology of the moon, the astronauts visited the Nevada Test Site:
There, they hiked inside several atomic craters, learning what kind of geology they might have to deal with on the lunar surface’s inhospitable terrain.
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“I was with them in 1965, and again five years later when they came back,” Williams recalls. This time the astronauts arrived with a lunar roving vehicle to test what it might be like driving on the moon.
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The lunar roving vehicle was not a fast-moving vehicle, and the astronauts took turns driving it. “NASA had built it and had driven it in a lot of flat places,” Williams explains. “But before it came to the test site and drove on the craters, the vehicle had no real experience on inhospitable terrain.
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The craters Williams was talking about are subsidence craters—geologic by-products of underground bomb tests. When a nuclear bomb is placed in a deep vertical shaft, as hundreds were at the test site (not to be confused with tunnel tests), the explosion vaporizes the surrounding earth and liquefies the rock. Once that molten rock cools, it solidifies at the bottom of the cavity, and the earth above it collapses, creating the crater. The glass-coated rock, giant boulders, and loose rubble that remain resemble the craters found on the moon. So similar in geology were the atomic craters to moon craters that in voice transcripts sent back during the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, astronauts twice referred to the craters at the Nevada Test Site. During Apollo 16, John W. Young got specific. A quarter of a million miles away from Earth, while marveling at a lunar crater laden with rocks, Young asked fellow astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., “Remember how it was up at that crater? At Schooner.” He was referring to the atomic crater Ernie Williams took the astronauts to in Area 20. During Apollo 17, while looking at the Haemus Mountains, Harrison H. Schmitt can be heard talking about the Buckboard Mesa craters in Area 19. For Ernie Williams, hearing this comparison was a beautiful moment. For lunar-landing conspiracy theorists, of which there are millions worldwide, the feeling was one of suspicion. For these naysayers, Schmitt’s telemetry tapes, the moon photographs, the moon rocks—everything having to do with the Apollo moon missions would become grist for a number of ever-growing conspiracies that have been tied to man’s journey to the moon.
Or maybe they referred to “the moon” as the Nevada test site because that’s where they really are?
Crazy how in MASH Korea looks so much like California, right?