Charlie Duke, the youngest astronaut on the
moon, is returning to Flagstaff in September
as the keynote speaker at an annual science
festival. He and Jason Young, who were on
Apollo 17, named a moon crater “Flag Crater.”
Retired Flagstaff geologist Gerald Schaber
plans to celebrate the lunar legacy wearing
the same turquoise bolo tie that distinguished
Shoemaker’s Arizona crew from others who
worked on moon missions. Schaber was at
Mission Control in Houston in 1969, monitoring
black-and-white images while bent over a
map trying to gauge the distance between
Armstrong and Aldrin using cutouts of the men.
“I was just trying to do the best I could with the
primitive tracking ability we had in those days,”
he said from his home in Flagstaff where he has
a signed photograph of a hill on the moon that
Apollo 15 astronauts referred to “Schaber Hill.”
Of the three crater fields created in northern
Arizona for astronaut training in the late
1960s, only one has a sign acknowledging its
importance in the moon missions. Visitors can
walk through gaps in a barbed-wire fence and
feel their feet sink into the volcanic cinders,
although not as deep as the astronauts’ feet on
the moon.
The craters don’t come into view without being
close up, some as darkened, shallow depressions
and others as giant welts in the ground partially
lost to the weather.
Arizona has approved a nomination to list
several of the training sites on the National
Register of Historic Places to better preserve
them, but federal approval is still needed.