Columnist Scott Dickensheets: They landed on their lunar feet

THIS IS, almost literally, a footnote to history -- a note about historical feet. Nonhuman feet whose most vital work was done on the moon.

"One just falls into these things," begins David Weide, a UNLV geology professor, leaning back in his chair as he goes back in time.

Back to the early '60s, when, fresh from the Army, he joined the special projects wing of Douglas Aircraft Co. What business does an aerospace company have with a geologist? One word: Sputnik. "It was 1963," Weide says. "The race for the moon was on." Scientists of every stripe were involved.

Douglas was among the sub-sub-sub contractors building pieces of the first lunar module. Weide's team was assigned a deceptively simple task -- design the feet the craft would land on.

Deceptively simple because the range of possibilities was endless -- "from something resembling a beach ball to a spike, and everything in between.

"There was a great deal of speculation as to the actual nature of the moon's surface," Weide says. "There were people who firmly believed the surface of the moon was coated with a thick layer of dust, and any spacecraft landing there would simply sink out of sight."

Step 1: Create a model of lunar soil. Reasoning that it would likely be volcanic, Weide created faux lunar sand by melting, then crushing basalt rock (samples of moon dirt later confirmed his hunch).

Next: Subject it to a vacuum comparable to the moon's. Once the bulky vacuum chamber had been built, Weide planned to insert his moon dust, then pelt it with weights to test the sinkability factors. "My colleagues thought this was going to be hysterical," he recalls.

Instead, it was eye-opening. Under the vacuum, the sand particles cleaved together in a process known as cold welding. He knew: "The lunar module would not sink."

After testing on the hardened lava of Idaho's Craters of the Moon National Monument, they settled on a design: "Sorta like frisbees, concaved upward," Weide says.

The Big Day, July 20, 1969. Weide and his Douglas Aircraft colleagues are glued to the TV as the lunar module descended. "We were sitting there like this," he says, tightening his face into a mask of anxiety. Feet don't fail us now! "Neil Armstrong is counting out the descent mode. Then there's a swirl of dust and everyone's heart stopped."

The Eagle had landed. It didn't sink!

"Everyone goes whewwww," he says.

After a few minutes, the craft's exterior cameras showed the feet -- imbeded only a couple inches. "A huge cheer goes up," Weide says. A bigger hand for the feet than the landing!

Then Armstrong emerged from the capsule. "He puts his foot down, and it doesn't sink," Weide remembers. "There was another big cheer." Any foot was worth a big hand now.

With that, Armstrong stepped into history -- and while the story ends here, the legend doesn't.

Weide notes that Armstrong and his wife were both geologists. "When Neil stepped from the spacecraft, he of course said, 'One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' And she -- I think her name was Nancy -- supposedly said, 'Oh, come on, Neil, be objective!"'

He bursts into laughter. "Now, whether she really said that or not, I don't know for sure. But it's so typical of a geologist I'll bet it's probably true."

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