When Your Crush Becomes a Climate Change Denier

A dusty and triumphant
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt
after one of his three
Apollo 17 moon walks
in December 1972.

As the airliner crossed the Sandia Mountains, rattling from heat waves rising off the sensually tan, sagebrush dotted terrain that seemed close enough to touch, I knew I was back in New Mexico.

I was 20 and was making my third trip to Albuquerque, and my first in 12 years. This was the city where my parents had lived for four years just before I was born.

I had visited the Land of Enchantment twice in the 1960s and now in the summer of 1979, I felt a familiarity with so much in this state – the Socorro sand dunes, Carlsbad’s massive caverns, the adobe houses of Albuquerque’s sun splashed thoroughfares, and the delectable sopapillas served in the restaurants along them.

Yet there was one thing in Albuquerque with which I was not well familiar -- my own father. He had moved back to Albuquerque after my parents' divorce when I was two and one-half, and I saw him infrequently growing up -- I mean once or twice a decade.

So I do not at all identify with Robert Bly's assertion that males are collectively wounded by the transition to industrial society that resulted in their fathers leaving home for eight hours a day.

These dads came back each evening, right, Mr. Bly?

But at 20, on the advice of a sibling, I decided to give a father-son relationship another try. And on this brilliant July day, minutes after the jet passed over the “thermals,” the heat bubbles causing it to rattle about every 30 seconds, I would shortly be walking through the Albuquerque Sunport and -- perhaps at the same spot where I had bid him farewell in 1967 -- be greeted by George Morrison.

He was my father, but anyone who lived in New Mexico in the 1950s and ‘60s knew him better than I did. The man who was my dad also for 10 years had been that state's best-known television news anchorman, delivering daily 6 and 11 pm newscasts which -- for the lack of another TV market in New Mexico during many of those years -- were beamed statewide. That's a territory that would stretch from Louisville to Minnesota.

New Mexicans also knew my father for his articulate charm, occasional outspoken commentaries, his piloting jets in the New Mexico Air National Guard, and his closeness to eminent politicians. 

But the TV screen could not nearly contain Dad’s abilities.

After he earned a law degree circa 1970, he left the news business, but remained highly recognized while serving as assistant district attorney for Albuquerque, regularly talking on the air about high profile cases. In a final career, Dad, in his last seven years, wrote and self-published three books, involving his life, broadcasting years and sometimes stormy family background in West Virginia and Kentucky.

Two of Dad’s close friends were author William Eastlake -- whom Dad had helped choose the title of his signature book Castle Keep -- and Clarence Birdseye Jr., whose father’s invention of frozen foods still determines the itinerary of your grocery trips.

In a room filled with my dad’s friends from New Mexico, it seems the only one the 20-year-old me wouldn’t already know the life story of was the one who had sired me.

Dad reports the day's news
 on KOB-TV in Albuquerque,
mid 1950s.

I knew he was a Democrat and had from time to time been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, a quest which could have succeeded before Watergate gave media the mandate to report on personal missteps such as the philandering and heavy drinking my father did until his early 50s.

What kind of Democrat was he? I heard him say good things about civil rights (he had once served as the legal counsel for the Zuni Indian tribe), but overall supportive things about the Vietnam War (he told me of a passionate argument with the very anti-war Eastlake).

An English lit degree holder from the University of Louisville, Dad was by any standard pro-civil liberties and he once oversaw the consumer protection division of Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County -- but knowing he came of age in the 1930s and 40s, can you wager a guess about which issue would prompt this otherwise enlightened intellectual to lapse into bigotry at the drop of a hat?

Or, more precisely, at a gesture or an enunciation that struck him as effeminate?

I don’t mean my father would ridicule anyone in their presence, but while at his apartment during my 1979 visit, I saw him launch into a tirade of insults while we were watching a brief TV segment featuring an interview with a man he figured was gay. Suddenly, I saw the Louisville high school football standout and World War II veteran my father also had been.

But there was one more famous person for Dad to introduce me to on this trip. I asked if he knew U.S. Sen. Harrison Schmitt, a first-term New Mexico Republican.

In keeping with Dad’s Robin Leach-like knack for associating with the famous, yes, he in fact worked down the hall from and occasionally chatted with Schmitt, who went by his nickname Jack. Dad said he would be glad to try to arrange a meeting.

The senator, my father added, was a political wunderkind, winning election in 1976 as a dogmatic conservative counterpoised to unions in such a pro-labor state. Of course, four years before that, the geologist Jack Schmitt had walked on the moon on Apollo 17, the grandest and most successful of the six lunar landing missions.

Extra terrestrial glory can obscure a clash in political philosophies -- or as in the case of John Glenn, even ease the effects of being mired in the S & L scandal. 

      A nearly perfect final Apollo moon mission concludes in the Pacific.

So Schmitt wasn’t that extremist out to break your union. He was a space hero, who had turned moon dust into politically magic dust.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the ex-senator Jack Schmitt has become a climate change denier, (in a video, he used the term “denier,” between spoken quote marks, to describe himself) repeatedly condemning the theory of human causes of global warming as fiction by an environmental movement he casts as surreptitious.

Yet, Schmitt's speaking style is even tempered and refreshingly civil in a time of absolutist polemics. In interviews, he is friendly and upbeat describing how important reading was while he was growing up in Silver City, N.M., and calling for more emphasis on reading in his state’s public schools.

His spoken criticisms of the climate action movement are free of the threatening, fist-shaking jeremiad tone of today’s far right. He is more like the Gerald Ford we miss than the Donald Trump we’re sick of. Nonetheless, the substance of Schmitt’s climate message is often extreme, cherry-picked, and unnuanced about the relationship between ideology and pollution. 

In 2011, Schmitt, recalling the opening of the Berlin Wall, said: “[T]he great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement.”

Flat out contradicting this is the fact that Communist East Germany in 1984 was rated the most polluted country in Europe, largely because its government powered the nation on Lignite, a far dirtier coal than was used in the capitalist west. LINK to 1984 Christian Science Monitor story on this.

In 2014, Scientific American reported that in the 10 years after the opening of the Berlin Wall, carbon pollution in the former East Germany dropped by 15 percent. By 2013, SA reported, the territory that was East Germany used renewable sources for 40 percent of its electricity.

These are inconvenient truths for anyone who would condemn environmentalism by comparing it to the Marxism-Leninism of Eastern Europe – or for that matter, who would champion Marxism-Leninism as better for the environment than capitalism.

The environmental policies which were really behind the Berlin Wall are not the only facts Harrison Schmitt simply can’t be bothered with.

Just before the 2016 election, he co-authored a Wall Street Journal piece titled “The Phony War Against C02," in which he and Rodney Nichols asserted that the warming underway could be beneficial for agriculture, citing the website of the anti-climate action CO2 Coalition, which says:

"The costs of emissions regulations, which will be paid by everyone, will be punishingly high and will provide no benefits to most people anywhere in the world.”

On a site called Climate Feedback, six scientists analyzed Nichols' and Schmitt's article, concluding that the authors rely heavily on ideologically slanted, rather than respected scientific sources. One of the six, University of Utah associate professor William Anderegg, wrote:

“The conclusions on CO2 uniformly benefiting agriculture are simply misleading—yes, CO2 can help plants but higher temperatures and more drought and pests with climate change also hurt plants.”

Undaunted, Harrison Schmitt was a signatory of a petition organized by Cato Institute fellow Richard Lindzen urging then President Donald Trump to pull the United States out of the United Nations international convention on climate change. Oh, it was that same United Nations that issued the 1984 report shaming East Germany as an environmental criminal regime.

Back in 1979, climate change was a vague issue, but Schmitt's staunch conservatism on economics, contrasted with my enthusiastic belief in socialism (I mean real socialism, not that East German-style state capitalism) still should make for quite a chasm to bridge when I shake hands with the senator. Could it get tense?

No. My fascination with space would make meeting Jack Schmitt an apolitical thrill.

And if memories of his three walks on Taurus-Littrow weren’t enough, there was another reason why meeting Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt would be memorable: He also had been my first same-sex crush.

I mean minutes after the Apollo 17 crew returned from the moon in December 1972, splashing down near Samoa, I saw him without his helmet for the first time and… well, he had just returned, and I was now off to the moon.

That was the instant I, as a 14-year-old, knew I was bisexual. I never told my father of this, and didn’t care to seven years later during my 1979 visit, but wouldn’t Schmitt’s office have been a bizarre venue for that? Imagine coming out to your father, a senator, an astronaut, a veteran journalist, a Republican, a Democrat, an anti-environmentalist and a homophobic district attorney all at once!

I don’t know whether I would have been prosecuted, disinherited, evicted or pepper sprayed.

This explosive moment of familial and political drama never happened, though. Schmitt wasn’t in town during my visit.

That is not surprising. You see, the senator went on to be defeated in 1982, the first time a U.S. astronaut lost a general election in five races. The big issue raised by Democrat Jeff Bingaman (and yes, Dad knew him, too) was the fact that the incumbent seemed never to be in the state, physically or ideologically. Schmitt was constantly touring, speaking about the cause of mining the moon, an issue which was absolutely irrelevant during a severe recession in 1982 which had focused voters’ attention on the here and now, not on rocks a quarter-million miles away.

“What on Earth has he done for you lately?” was the highly effective catch phrase of Bingaman’s TV ads.

Today, Schmitt’s status as a private citizen gives him the mobility to challenge without electoral consequence the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming and to press for his still passionate cause of building a thriving lunar extraction industry.

If on global warming scientific opinion has steadily turned heavily against the view of Schmitt and other conservatives, on the matter of mining the moon, he is gaining allies.

How we could mine the moon

                     ----------------------------

But is it ours for the taking?

   ---------------------------

I long thought the idea was pie-in-the-sky, but I’ve recently checked some trustworthy sources, and my view on lunar extraction has altered. 

A NASA website explains several technologically feasible and financially efficient arrangements for mining and manufacturing on the moon, then shipping the finished products to Earth. They could involve robots or humans, and would use 3-D printing to build facilities.

Of foremost importance, NASA says, is the moon’s abundance of an element called Helium-3 which we could use to generate pollution-free fusion electricity, and Rare Earth Minerals we’re expected to run out of on our planet in about 20 years, and which are crucial in making computers, cell phones and medical equipment.

But the site acknowledges many obstacles to lunar extraction – financial, diplomatic and aesthetic. Would our parents have fallen in love on romantic mine-lit walks?

Yes, whereas NASA estimated that only about 1 percent of the lunar mass would be removed in 220 years of proposed mining methods (and ocean tides would not be affected), an infographic suggested that centuries down the road pockmarking of the moon’s surface could be evident from Earth.

Would we lose the “Silvery Moon” to keep charging up our cell phones? Let’s remember our responsibility to our descendants.

And speaking of romantic feelings and the matter of surface attractiveness, Harrison Schmitt, the dashing, dark-haired apple of my eye in the early 1970s, is 83 now. He still looks appealing and has a listenable voice, but there is the political clash. 

Besides, a 14-year-old’s passions last about as long as a moonbeam.

                  ____________________________________

Brian Arbenz follows space exploration and supports climate action from his home in Louisville, Ky. USA

A FATAL MOMENT IN THE CLOUDS... Remembering Elliot See and Charles Bassett

By Brian Arbenz
Was it bad weather, pilot error, or an excessive need to prove critics wrong that caused two astronauts to die 53 years ago near the Saint Louis airport?
In 1966, as the United States space program finally was poised to pass a Soviet Union the U.S. had trailed for eight years, a sense of “Go Fever” gripped the tens of thousands of NASA and contractor workers from Cape Canaveral to Houston.
And on the morning of Feb. 28 that year, another place was central to that eager spirit. In a cold and intermittently snowy and rainy Saint Louis, Mo., the Gemini spacecraft manufacturer McDonnell Aircraft Corp.’s Building 101 contained the Gemini IX.
Inside that craft, astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett were to orbit the Earth in May of that year and dock with a drone Agena craft. Bassett would perform a spacewalk.

Elliot See (left), and Charles Bassett in their NASA

Gemini IX crew photo, weeks before their deaths.

A docking and spacewalk had to be mastered if we were eventually to go to the moon. The two maneuvers had not yet been done successfully on any single U.S. space flight, making Gemini IX a pivotal moment in the moon race. The rookie astronauts See and Bassett took off from Houston at 7:41 a.m. Central Time Feb. 28 in a T-38 jet piloted by See for a 90-minute flight to Saint Louis’ Lambert Field airport. The airport is adjacent to McDonnell, where in Building 101, Bassett and See would undergo mission training inside the Gemini IX.
Fine weather in Houston turned cold and cloudy above Arkansas and by the time the jet was over Missouri, conditions were overcast with rain and snow mixed. Just off the Lambert Field runway where See and Bassett were to land, hundreds of McDonnell workers in Building 101 were busily putting final touches on Gemini IX and assembling the nearby Gemini X, which would fly later in the year.
Gemini IX backup crew members Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan flew the route from Houston to Lambert in a separate T-38 jet.
It was the very picture of a space project proceeding briskly and competently; the flying mastery of astronauts in the air and diligence and organization of workers inside the Building 101 the planes were nearing.
Then, in a hellacious instant, all that skill and savvy gave way to chaos that revealed to the public the imperfect nature of exploring space and of the people who go there.
Foggy conditions dictated that the T-38 planes made a second landing approach, this time using instruments to assure a safe landing.
Stafford, piloting the backup crew plane, started to do just that, then was baffled to observe See’s plane making a turn to approach the runway – without instruments.
Stafford could be heard on radio asking, “Goddammit, where’s HE going?” On his next attempt, Stafford landed safely, with no knowledge of exactly what had resulted from pilot See’s risky maneuver.
Just before Stafford and Cernan landed, a confused ground crew asked the two to identify themselves, unsure which plane was which. Stafford then complained that his radio communications had not been returned by the Lambert tower during an approach made tense by bad weather and low fuel.
The frustration of the twangy-voiced Oklahoma native Stafford continued as his plane came to a halt and he and Cernan opened its canopy, but a minute later all was forgiven.
It was immediately clear that something was up as McDonnell Aircraft founder James McDonnell made the unusual move of coming outside to talk in person to Stafford and Cernan. He somberly informed them that the other plane had crashed into the roof of Building 101, instantly killing Elliot See and Charles Bassett.

 
A NASA dot gov history page said: “The aircraft struck the roof of the building and crashed into a courtyard…. An investigative board chaired by astronaut Alan B. Shepherd attributed the crash to weather and pilot error on See's part in choosing to keep his plane so low.”

The site AmericaSpace dot com described the fatal moment this way: “Descending through the cloud deck, the two jets appeared directly over the centerline of the southwest runway at 8:55 a.m. Both were much too low and traveling much too fast to achieve a landing. Stafford had remained in position on See’s right wing, but decided to ascend and perform a flyaround for another approach. He assumed that See would do the same. Inexplicably, though, See executed a tight turn to reach the runway.

“Years later, the only explanation for why he did this was that he wanted to beat the backup crew to the ground; an unusual act for a pilot who had earned a reputation for being both careful and judicious.”

No communications were heard from See or Bassett during the seconds leading up to the disaster. But one last act by See – performed the moment he saw he was dangerously low -- was an historically influential deed. See fired his afterburner engines in a belated attempt to rise fast enough to clear the suddenly visible Building 101, and though this desperate maneuver was too late to save himself or Bassett, the small jump in altitude that resulted caused the T-38 to braze the roof, rather than strike the mid portion of the building. Far from being a minor difference, this last-second alteration in the plane’s path actually saved the Gemini project and President Kennedy’s goal of getting to the moon by the end of the 1960s.

As AmericaSpace dot com explained: “If their T-38 had been a little lower when it hit Building 101, See and Bassett would have ploughed straight into the assembly line, destroying Gemini IX and X and probably killing hundreds of McDonnell’s skilled spacecraft construction workers.”

Tom Stafford, in his memoir called We Have Capture, wrote: “Had they hit a couple of hundred feet earlier, they would have hit the side and roof of the building, instead of just the end of the roof, and wiped out the whole Gemini program.”
Project Gemini was indispensable in advancing from the short if dramatic one-person Earth orbital Mercury flights to the complex, eight-to-10-day Apollo moon flights.
No Gemini, no Apollo.
AmericaSpace added: “Miracles seemed far from St Louis during that gloomy, overcast day on which See and Bassett breathed their last, but it is quite remarkable that no one on the ground was seriously injured and their spacecraft, Gemini IX, survived.”

Tail wreckage of See and

Bassett's T-38 jet.

Behind is the gash made 

in the roof.

AmericaSpace said that though the steep last second climb saved Building 101 and two Gemini craft, workers inside scrambled in fear, diving for cover under benches as “as a sheet of flame rippled across the corrugated iron roof,” and fragments from the T-38’s shattered wing flooded into the building, hitting the Gemini X spacecraft. “Other workers heard noises which they variously described as resembling sonic booms or the echo of thunder, as well as sudden flashes of fire and the manifestation of clouds of dust and fumes. Around a dozen McDonnell employees were injured by ceiling debris, including 19-year-old production worker Clyde Ethridge, who sustained a serious back injury.”

The most horrible discovery came later in the day, and readers should brace themselves – Charles Bassett’s severed head was found jammed high in the rafters of Building 101. Elliot See had been thrown clear of the jet and his corpse would be found in the parking lot, with his parachute half-opened.
See, a Dallas native; and Bassett, who was from Dayton, Ohio, were buried in Arlington four days later. Both were married. See left three children; Bassett left two.
The entire NASA astronaut contingent attended the funeral, but after the day’s reverence, a NASA-military culture of finger pointing after fatal crashes took hold, and speculation about Elliot See’s fitness to fly the T-38 jet continues in space buff circles more than 50 years later.
The AmericaSpace site includes a powerful recollection by future Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham of a day in 1965, published in his memoir titled The All-American Boys. Cunningham wrote that he flew backseat in a T-38 flight with See, who wanted to fly over Taylor Lake in the Houston area and buzz his house, a common astronaut antic. At one stage, with a full load of fuel, AmericaSpace said, See brought the jet to an altitude of 50 feet (15 meters), an airspeed of 170 knots, and no flaps down. “The T-38 with a full load of fuel won’t fly a whole lot slower than 165 knots, even with the flaps down,” Cunningham wrote. “The fact that he was flying way too slow troubled me only to the extent that it could get me killed.”
Cunningham called “Hey, how about half-flaps” and See concurred, dropping half flaps, waving to his wife, and flying away.
That hair-raising episode, AmericaSpace said, “would be brought home to Cunningham with a horrifying sharpness, less than a year later, on 28 February 1966.”
Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, writing about the crash at Building 101, remembers See having the opposite deficiency – flying with too little abandon.
Slayton, the Mercury astronaut grounded until 1975 due to a heart murmur, had the job of choosing crews for NASA flights. In his autobiography, Slayton wrote that Elliot See’s piloting skills, while highly competent, lacked military aggressiveness. He called See’s flying style “old woman-ish,” a double slur disrespecting See, and such scientific geniuses as Grace Hopper, Betty Holberton and Jean Bartik, whose pioneering of the computer, including while they were old, put America on the moon.
Slayton said a sentimental feeling that See deserved a top spot prompted the decision that he command Gemini IX, a choice Slayton later regretted, partly because in that capacity, See piloted the T-38 to Saint Louis.
But NASA legend Neil Armstrong – who like See was chosen an astronaut as a civilian -- defended See’s piloting ability, saying the disaster at Saint Louis involved events too frenetic and unknowable to show any aerial unfitness by him.
Could Slayton’s doubts be partly based on cultural bias, not just fact? Most of See’s 3,900 hours of piloting jets were during his time flying for General Electric, a huge military contractor in the 1960s – this was after his military service in U.S. Merchant Marine and the Naval Reserves Active Duty. Such a civilian flying career can be snickered at by Air Force, Marine and Navy fighter pilots.
St. Louis Magazine, in a 2006 piece on the crash, speculated that Elliot See’s actions at Lambert reflected the opposite of the cautious tentativeness of the “old woman” label.
“A talented civilian test pilot, he knew that completing such a bold maneuver in this weather would have its rewards: His Flight 901 would beat the backup crew to the ground by several minutes—and live to give them hell about it. The 38-year-old father of three still had a little vinegar in him.”
Whether due to too much confidence, or too much Aunt Bea in See’s flying instincts, the consensus is that indeed his piloting decisions led to the crash.
Lily Koppel, in her 2013 book, “The Astronaut Wives Club,” wrote that on Air Force bases and at NASA, personal relations usually can’t survive multiple fatalities attributed to pilot mistakes.
“When you’re in the program, you’re in, in, in,” Jeannie Bassett said in the book. “Then something happens and you’re out. I don’t want to hang around and be the big happy fifth wheel.” She quickly moved with her children to San Francisco after the crash.

Charles Bassett's family at his funeral.

As for Marilyn See, whose husband saved Building 101 and its Geminis, but not himself or his crewmate, she didn’t leave Houston immediately. Koppel wrote, “Marilyn See stuck it out through a year of dirty looks and hushed silences.”
More than 50 years later, much micro-critiquing of Elliot See’s suitability to fly the T-38 continues on corners of the blogosphere.
“I sometimes wonder if Elliot See was aware of the whispers being made about his skills as a pilot (Deke Slayton describing them as ‘Old woman-ish’ i.e., not forceful or aggressive enough),” a blogger who said he is a pilot wrote in 2011 on collectspace dot com. “That could have been in the back of his mind as he made the decision (to land without instruments).”
The blogger described the landing See attempted as “risky,” in bad weather, though often done successfully.
“It requires a significant amount of division of attention to keep the runway in sight, maintain the proper altitude, stay close to the runway, and fly the airplane to a normal touchdown.
“We will never know what was going through the minds of See and Bassett during the last few seconds of their lives. I still consider Elliot See one of my heroes, just like the other astronauts, but he messed up that day. He and Bassett paid the price.”
Wherever Elliot See may be thought of as being – an afterlife, or in the collective memories of space exploration aficionados – it is long past the time to let him, his relatives and ourselves rest by fully appreciating his and Charles Bassett’s contributions to humanity’s greatest endeavor.
We could talk more about how his last act was a split-second decision under duress that raised his jet’s altitude just barely enough to save hundreds of lives and allow the Apollo moon program to continue.
Or, we could just bow to the permanent reality that space exploration is a dangerous business, stop trying to get inside Elliot McKay See’s mind, and let go of a 53-year-old fatal moment in the clouds.

Brian Arbenz, who grew up passionately following space exploration, was 7 when Elliot See and Charles Bassett died.