10 August 2017

NASA JOHNSON SPACE CENTER ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

EDITED ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

JUDITH H. ALLTON

INTERVIEWED BY JENNIFER ROSS-NAZZAL

HOUSTON, TEXAS – 10 AUGUST 2017

The questions in this transcript were asked during an oral history session. Ms. Allton has edited 

and revised the answers. As a result, this transcript does not exactly match the audio recording. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: Today is August 10, 2017. This interview with Judy Allton is being conducted in 

Houston, Texasfor the JSC Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal. Thanks 

again for taking some time this afternoon to meet with me, I appreciate it.

ALLTON: My pleasure.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I was given your name by someone in Knowledge Management. They said you 

were the historian of the LRL [Lunar Receiving Laboratory], so I thought we had to interview you 

and get some of that history.

ALLTON: I was curious where you came up with my name.

ROSS-NAZZAL: They said you were retiring so I said, “We should interview her.” You graduated 

from college in 1969. Did you follow the space program at all?

ALLTON: Not really, I was in chemistry. I did give some thought as to how I got interested in that. 

I was at the [University of Texas at Austin] Marine Science [Institute] Lab in Port Aransas on July 
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20, 1969. We students were out on the deck at the professor’s beach house looking at the full 

Moon and waiting for the fuzzy television images of astronauts stepping onto the Moon’s surface. 

Most people my age remember exactly where they were when that happened.

ROSS-NAZZAL: It was certainly a momentous occasion that had never happened before, so I can 

imagine it was a big deal.

ALLTON: I got more interested in the space program when I applied for a job here at JSC back in 

1974. I was working for the Texas Water Quality Board in the EPA [Environmental Protection 

Agency] Lab. We sampled and analyzed water in the Houston Ship Channel and other places. 

One of the NASA contractors advertised a job opening for a chemist, so I just went home and 

poured a glass of wine and typed out something that said I was terrific. I got an interview, and I 

got hired. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: Where did you see the advertisement? In the [Houston] Chronicle?

ALLTON: It must have been in the Houston paper. I didn’t live on this side of town at the time, so 

that would have been the only place.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Oh yes, kind of a drive if you’re on the north side. What was your understanding 

of what you would be doing based on that newspaper advertisement?
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ALLTON: I do not remember what the advertisement set out as the job description. When I arrived,

they wanted someone to work in the laboratory where scientists returned samples from the Moon 

that they had been loaned for research. It was in curation. I’ve been in curation since 1974, so 

that was my first job for NASA. Scientists who had been allocated Apollo samples—they’re only 

on loan, so when they’re finished with them they have to return what’s left or the residue. We 

would receive and document those samples and archive them under clean conditions.

In those days, we operated two laboratories, one lab for “pristine” samples (never out of 

curatorial control) and one lab for returned samples. These days, in the new facility built in 1979, 

we have two separate vaults, one for pristine samples and one for returned samples. Pristine 

samples are stored and handled under nitrogen in gloveboxes. About 80 percent by weight of the 

collection is still in that state, which is nice because it’s a legacy for future generations. Even then, 

who would have thought it’d be this long before we’d go back to the Moon and get more? So 

reserving a portion of the samples for future studies was a good thing to do. We did this because 

NASA advisory committees were comprised of smart, visionary people.

There was a separate laboratory to process the samples being returned. Because they’d 

been out of curation control, we didn’t have a watchful eye over exactly how researchers handled 

their lunar samples. So researchers were required to return a form indicating what they had done 

to the samples. We tried to reallocate used samples where we could, in order to preserve the 

pristine ones. By reviewing the handling histories of the returned samples, I learned a lot about 

the people who had been allocated samples, because I would look up what they were studying, 

what they did in their lab, and document it. That’s how I learned who the customers are, the people 

that depend on getting good samples from curation for their experiments.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: You had been doing water sampling. How did you learn about lunar science and 

curation? Was there on-the-job training that you were offered?

ALLTON: Mostly I’m a curious person. But I probably had the right background in that I was an 

analytical chemist, and my master’s project was age-dating rocks, which is what many scientists 

measure for Apollo rocks. They determine how old rocks are. Isotopers in general tend to be 

pretty picky about contamination, and I had that background.

The other thing that’s played into my career here more recently is I did a little bit of marine 

science—it was marine geology—and that’s helpful in planetary protection issues. The Planetary 

Protection Office now convenes meetings of experts related to planetary protection issues. 

Participants in these meetings include people who analyze deep-sea cores or extremophiles in 

rocks way below the surface of the Earth. So my marine science experience has helped.

ROSS-NAZZAL: It wasn’t unusual for you to come in and know how to handle these type of things,

and what you had to do to handle a sample?

ALLTON: No, it was kind of natural. I knew some of the “customers” for curated Apollo samples. 

The same people that returned lunar samples were well-known in isotope geology, and I was 

familiar with their work.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Did you know many of the people who were working out here when you accepted 

the position?
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ALLTON: No, I came in as a lower-level, hands-on sample processing person.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Were there many other women working in the lab at that point or people of color?

ALLTON: There was a fair number of women. People of color worked in the lab. I personally 

didn’t detect any discrimination, but, in recent years colleagues have confided a few examples 

from those early days, the 1970s, of discrimination regarding raises and task assignments. I can 

think of one example of sexual harassment, but back then, most women just went out of their way 

to avoid this person.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I’m just curious because we don’t have a lot of stats on how many people worked 

in what groups and how many people of color there were. You can’t really tell by someone’s 

name. How many women there were, you can normally tell that by name. It’s interesting to me 

how NASA has changed over the years. Always curious if there were a lot of women or minorities 

in groups, especially in the early ’70s.

ALLTON: If you were asking how many women were lunar sample investigators, that’s a different 

story. There were not very many. I can think of three from the early days. One was a petrologist 

named Odette [B.] James. I think she worked for the USGS [U.S. Geological Survey]. I’m aware 

of her because she served on some of the oversight committees. She’d be the only woman, except 

the secretary of the group, in the 1972 Lunar Sample Analysis Planning Team (LSAPT) picture. 

Carle [M.] Pieters has been doing remote sensing for a very long time from Brown [University,

Providence, Rhode Island] and was active back then and well known. Ursula [B.] Marvin was 
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active in meteorites. I’m not real sure she had lunar samples at the time, but the studies were 

similar and the science groups were intermingled. Composition of lunar sample investigators and 

resulting NASA advisory committees has changed a lot.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I’m sure it has.

ALLTON: I can remember being at a meeting—I couldn’t tell you when exactly, I think it was in 

New Mexico, maybe late ’90s, early 2000s—in the ladies’ room, and they were having a spirited 

discussion over some planetary science debate. I thought, “It wouldn’t have been this way 20 

years earlier.” That was a milestone, having a discussion in the ladies’ room.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I can imagine it was kind of lonely in there. Very few of you.

ALLTON: But that’s not the onsite NASA folks. That’s really the people we interact with at mostly 

academic institutions.

ROSS-NAZZAL: When you came here you started working in Building 31. The samples had already 

been moved over to Building 31, you weren’t working out at the LRL at the time?

ALLTON: That’s correct, I did not work in the LRL. Lunar samples were moved from Building 

37 to Building 31 in 1973. All samples had been moved in by the time I got here in 1974, so the 

stories about the LRL were still alive. As you may know, there was quite a bit of tension between 

the biology groups and geology groups.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: Can you talk about that?

ALLTON: A lot, probably. This is all from stories. I collected my stories among the geologists, 

so it has a certain bias. There were two kinds of geology folks. The job of the geologists who

worked inside the Lunar Receiving Lab, inside the barrier, (the Preliminary Examination Team, 

PET) was to characterize the rocks as they were opened. They described the rocks geologically, 

for the purpose of making wise allocations, and reported to the advisory oversight committee, who 

made sample allocation recommendations.

The oversight committee geologists (LSAPT) were kept outside the bio barrier and 

received reports each day from the PET. LSAPT would review the requests for samples and decide 

if the research request was a good use of the samples—if this requestor was qualified and had the 

right instruments to achieve the required analytical sensitivity to address the science question. 

LSAPT depended on data from the PET to make their decisions. There was a tension between the 

insiders (PET) and the outsiders (LSAPT) when the LRL was active. This is all from stories told 

to me.

My favorite one is [S.] Ross Taylor, who was probably the world’s best known emission

spectrograph person. They had in the Lunar Receiving Lab an emission spectrograph. That is an 

instrument which zaps a sample between two electrodes and the light emitted is diagnostic of the

elements that are in the sample. Ross Taylor received a very early sample Monday after the rock 

box (the Apollo Lunar Sample Return Container, ALSRC) was opened on Saturday. (The story is

from an interview I did with Ross Taylor, some articles he wrote, and laboratory notebooks in our 

archives. There’s other stories people tell about him.)
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Ross received his first lunar sample in his LRL lab just before noon on July 28, 1969. The 

sample was inserted in the nitrogen glovebox, which is behind the biological barrier, and zapped 

between the electrodes; this is for Moon dust sample 10015. 

I need to digress here and explain what it was like to work behind the bio-barrier and how 

Ross Taylor came to be working in the LRL. The Lunar Receiving Lab was built as a containment 

facility as well as a laboratory to examine lunar samples. Containment policies were established 

by the Interagency Committee on Back Contamination (ICBC). Members of the ICBC came from 

the U.S. Public Health Service, Department of Agriculture, and Department of the Interior. 

Working behind the bio-barrier, a containment barrier, involved removing all your clothes, putting 

on lab clothes, then entering the lab. Inside you couldn’t smoke or eat. Every time you went out 

you had to remove the lab clothes, shower out with a harsh soap, walk naked through an ultraviolet 

airlock, then you could put on your own clothing and leave. I’ve had other people tell me they 

quit smoking because they couldn’t stand one more shower. That was pretty stressful, and Ross 

felt the stress. While working inside the lab, people had to wear gas mask respirators, hanging 

from a cord around their neck, ready to don immediately in case there was a leak causing direct 

exposure to lunar dust. (An example of a leak would be a hole in the glove.) All samples were 

handled inside of nitrogen gloveboxes at negative pressure to the room. 

Ross Taylor came to the LRL relatively late. He just happened to be visiting the U.S. in 

1969, and LRL managers were having trouble getting that part of the lab working like they wanted. 

So they asked Ross Taylor if he would come lead the emission spectrograph lab. Ross and his 

wife were in the middle of building a house back in Australia. His wife said, “No, you’ve got to 

go.” So he came. He would work from early in the morning till two or three the next morning. 

The reason he had to put in those long hours was that he had only a few weeks to calibrate an 
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instrument that somebody else had set up to make the very first measurement of the Moon’s 

chemistry. The calibration normally would take 6 months or a year.

On July 28th at eleven forty-five a.m. lunar dust sample 10015 arrived in Ross Taylor’s espec lab. Ross’ task was to analyze the sample so the results could be reported at a four p.m. press 

conference. The sample is immediately placed into the glovebox and zapped between electrodes. 

The light emitted is dispersed by wavelength onto a negative; the wavelength is indicative of the 

element and the density of the line indicative of the amount. Hundreds of lines are printed onto 

the negative. Both wavelength and density need to be carefully measured and compared to 

standards. Ross begins his careful measurements and discovers an unexpectedly high amount of 

chromium in the lunar sample that overprints his standard calibration lines. He has to recalibrate. 

The spill alarm sounds. Ross dons his gas mask and keeps working. Security personnel wearing 

bio-isolation garments with goggles and respirators sweep through the lab and gather up anyone 

directly exposed to lunar material. Ross is able to complete his analysis and hand-off the results 

in time for the four p.m. press conference. He accomplished this under great stress, and his analysis 

was confirmed accurate by subsequent work under less stressful conditions.

The containment restrictions were annoyances to the some people working inside the LRL, 

mainly geologists, because they really didn’t believe there was a problem. Now that won’t be the 

same case for Mars. We have more evidence that there’s water, on Mars and more habitable 

temperatures, radiation, etc. The geologists thought there was no pathogens on the lunar surface, 

and, in general, chafed at the restrictions they thought were not totally necessary. 

Another topic, with shades of opinion, involved how much scientific data gathering should 

the PET do inside the LRL. The outside review committee LSAPT was taking requests from 

around the world for samples to analyze. LSAPT needed basic sample descriptions to make 
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appropriate sample allocation recommendations. The philosophy was “best samples for best 

science.” Implying that those scientists privileged to work inside the LRL and having the first 

look at the samples should not be able to scoop all the good science. It’s a valid point of view. 

The tricky part was how do you describe a sample enough that LSAPT can figure out best use and 

not so much to scoop the science, so to speak.

Here is an example why this boundary between superficial sample description and 

scooping science was difficult to determine. One of the debates was “How old are the rocks?” 

Ross Taylor was measuring elemental content, which included the potassium content. The Gas 

Analysis Lab upstairs was measuring argon isotopes. There’s a potassium-argon age-dating 

technique wherein one can calculate the age of a rock by precisely measuring small amounts of 

potassium and argon isotopes. LSAPT would invite the PET guys to come out every afternoon at 

four p.m. and ask, “Well, okay, what results did you get today?” The PET would just report the 

minimum they were required to report. In fact, both teams, the E-Spec Lab and the Gas Analysis 

Lab, were making much more precise measurements than they were required to report. Thus they 

could calculate how old the rocks were, and this was considered prohibited science by some on 

LSAPT. That is just a snapshot of the small tensions going on among geologists and the difficulty 

of keeping things fair. That was aside from the tensions between some geologists and biologists. 

At the hands-on level, I heard that geology and biology lab workers could work usefully together. 

For those responsible for achieving a science goal in this highly visible arena, there was sometimes 

comments regarding usefulness of using lunar material to “feed to mice and cockroaches.” I also

heard some people still remember the bad relationships in that period. 

I probably shouldn’t speak to the biology part. You need to talk to people like Gerry 

[Gerald R.] Taylor or others. I don’t think they kept their records. I had a hard time finding 
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original records from the biology side. I think we still have most of the geology documents in our 

archives. 

The biohazard detection laboratories were not places to keep lunar samples pristine for 

planetary science measurements. Biohazard labs used animals such germ-free white mice, 

cockroaches, Japanese quail, killifish, and oysters. Animals are naturally dirty. Biohazard labs, 

and also geology labs, were required to provide containers filled with organic-based sterilants such 

as peracetic acid, and perhaps carbolic acid, for dipping containers and equipment that were used

in the LRL. If one is trying to analyze for lunar organics, that’s not the optimum place to keep 

your samples clean. So there was a technical reason there was this head butting as well.

To this day, I still talk about the tension between trying to keep sample materials clean,

which is in conflict with the technology to keep it contained. An example is if you want to contain 

potentially hazardous material in a glove box, the glove box is operated at negative pressure. The 

gloves gets sucked into the glovebox. So if you have a leak, contaminants get sucked into where 

your samples are. If you want to keep pristine scientific samplesin the glovebox clean, you operate 

the glovebox positive pressure, so if you have a leak in the box contaminants do not get sucked in. 

You prevent sweat and skin cells or whatnot inside. It’s hard to do both at once. This technical 

tension still exists to this day, even if you throw robots in the mix. I think there’s going to be ways 

to do it. One way to manage this tension is to have some contained samples and some clean

samples in separate environments, or there could be a complex way to achieve both containment 

and cleanliness.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Things must have been a lot easier for you when you came since you didn’t have 

to shower; you didn’t have to do all these things. What did you have to do when you would go in 
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to work with the samples? Say you were preparing samples for some PIs [principal investigators]. 

What did you do when you went in to access those materials?

ALLTON: For returned samples in 1974, where I started working in curation, we would don a 

smock, shoe covers, and a hat in the change room, and then we would proceed through an air 

shower before entering the clean lab. I don’t even think we wore gloves. This was in Building 

31. Now we have Building 31N, and both the pristine and the returned lunar samples are stored 

over there. Building 31N is maximized for clean construction and sample security. (Note the 

building first carried the number 31A.) In the pristine sample lab and storage vaults, the materials 

of the wall coverings, paint, flooring, and lights were chemically screened to exclude elements 

known to interfere with sample analyses, mostly age dating analyses. 

When I first worked on cores, both extrusion and dissection, these activities took place in 

the pristine sample lab in Building 31, requiring pristine sample lab gowning requirements. The 

laboratory clothing consisted of a whole suit, called a bunny suit, booties, hat, and gloves that you 

would put on over your street clothes. Later when the lunar samples were moved from 31 to 31N 

in 1979, the pristine lab clothing and entry procedures were similar. The entry procedure went 

through a sequence of rooms, each with a room air pressure higher than the previous room. Every 

door opened into a higher pressure room which made the air flow outward from the cleanest core 

room. This keeps contaminants from entering the labs. There are six levels of clean room to go 

from the lobby to the sample vault: change room, clean change room where bunny suits are 

donned, airlock, pristine lab, buffer corridor to vault, and the vault.

I went from working with returned samples to opening and dissecting soil cores beginning 

in 1978 through 1981. Everything that I did with cores was delicate handwork. My little spatula
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was about five millimeter (mm) wide [demonstrates]. With it, I could scoop up maybe five 

milligrams at a time. I would sieve the subsamples through a one mm screen and then arrange the 

>one mm fragments on a white surface, using tweezers, to image the group. Positive glovebox 

pressure helps. It’s not that hard. I’m a little ambidextrous, so that helped too. It would take me 

about three months to do one of the large-diameter soil cores.

ROSS-NAZZAL: How much material are you talking about there for a core, one-inch diameter? 

How long are you talking about as well?

ALLTON: Let me recap the three types of core samples taken during Apollo. We had two designs 

of drive tubes. A drive tube is a tube pounded into the ground to collect an undisturbed column of 

regolith, Moon surface fines. The third type of coring device was a rotary, percussive drill made 

by Martin Marietta and used on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 to collect a soil column two to three meters 

deep. The first drive tube samples taken on Apollo 11, the samples taken by Buzz [Edwin E.] 

Aldrin [Jr.], were in tubes two centimeters in diameter and thirty-two centimeters (cm) long. 

The tube designers had the forethought to ask, “How are we going to get these open when 

we get them back in the lab?” Consequently, these tubes were double-wall. To open, we would 

unscrew the bit or the top end and slide out the inner tube which had already been split in half. 

The last step was to take a razor and slice the heat-shrink plastic that was holding it shut. This 

“easy open” design resulted in a thick tube wall, which along with the narrow tube diameter,

resulted in tubes that did not penetrate easily into the surprisingly dense lunar regolith. The Apollo 

11 drive tube samples were relatively short, ten to thirteen cm. You might have noted the Apollo 

11 core that I dissected was about this long [demonstrates].
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ROSS-NAZZAL: I did read that, yes.

ALLTON: The soil was more dense than people thought. I always remember that when you want 

to devise sampling tools or strategies on a new place, if you have multiple missions, you’re going 

to learn a lot the first time and can make adjustments for the second time. The Moon being closer, 

we can do that. One great advantage of the Apollo mission series over distant one-shot robotic 

missions is the ability to adapt equipment to the actual environment encountered. 

After Apollo 11, the drive tube bits were quickly redesigned for Apollo 12 and improved 

again for Apollo 14. The Apollo 12 and 14 drive tubes were capable of collecting regolith for the 

entire length of the tubes. There was time to do a complete re-design of the drive tubes for the last 

three missions.

One of the things we did was make the core tubes where they would go into that dense soil 

more easily with less disturbance of fine stratigraphy. The tubes were four-centimeter diameter, 

very thin-wall aluminum. The astronauts could screw two twelve-inch tubes together and collect 

a sixty cm profile [demonstrates]. Those four-cm diameter tubes were used on Apollo 15, 16, 17. 

On 15 the first drill core was taken, which had the rotary-percussive action. The titanium drill 

tubes were two-centimeter diameter with the flutes were on the outside. The two to three meter 

depth of the drill samples was very helpful scientifically because it allowed measurement of the 

cosmic ray flux into the lunar soil.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: You mentioned in your biographical sheets that you came up with the tools for 

how to open those cores. I wonder if you could talk about what those tools included and what you 

experimented with.

ALLTON: Depends on which core tube you’re talking about. On the drill stem parts with titanium, 

those were milled open. I didn’t come up with any of those. When you do a milling operation on 

a metal inside of a glove box full of nitrogen with no lubricants, it’s a pretty screechy proposition 

and vibrations were a problem that could not be completely eliminated.

A well thought-out process was developed for opening the four-cm diameter drive tubes,

which involved pushing the “soil,” also known as regolith, out of the tube in the same direction as 

the soil entered the tube while being collected on the Moon. This minimized distortion of the 

stratigraphy. The soil was pushed from the bottom using a ram into a container that was comprised 

of layers, which were removed sequentially to allow several passes for sampling the core vertical 

profile. The equipment to do this, used to do this, inside of a nitrogen-filled glovebox was 

complex, requiring tight tolerances and rehearsals.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You did rehearsals, dry runs?

ALLTON: Oh, yes.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Can you talk about those and why that was necessary?
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ALLTON: There are two parts to examining a four-cm drive tube: extrusion and dissection (the 

careful subdivision into half-centimeter depth increments). The equipment to push the soil out of 

the tube was called an extruder. The receptacle for the extruded soil had several layers screwed 

together to make the smooth bore. The layers were parallel to the length of the core tube. There 

are a lot of tight tolerance parts that need to be assembled in a precise sequence. We carefully 

controlled the materials allowed to come in contact with lunar soil. Most of the structural parts 

were made out of aluminum alloy 6061 with clear anodize on it. 

The only lubricant used at that time was Xylan, which is a Teflon compound allowed only 

because it was thought that the fluorocarbons would not be confused with natural organic 

compounds. It turned out that Xylan also contained an organic binder; therefore, Xylan was 

stripped from the screw threads for recent core extrusions and dissections. That was a lesson 

learned and a reminder to pay attention to details. 

When you design new sample return mission hardware, choosing a lubricant needs careful 

consideration. You need to pick a lubricant that is not going to off-gas organics, if you’re looking 

for life. For the Moon, there was so little carbon and so little water, many people interested in 

doing organic analyses on Apollo samples drifted away from requesting Apollo samples after the 

first few missions because the carbon on the Moon tended to be from the solar wind.

Now we’re going back to the Moon and looking for water: new set of instruments, new 

people attacking the problem. So we might get a slightly different answer, but the thinking back 

then was on keeping hardware very clean, restricting the kinds of materials, and cleaning each 

piece of hardware rigorously.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: What did you practice on then? You obviously weren’t practicing with lunar 

rocks, but what were you practicing with?

ALLTON: These remarks apply to the four-cm drive tubes. The extrusion and dissection hardware 

was developed in the early 1970s. Simulants used in core tubes during the development and testing 

of the hardware included powdered basalt, white minerals, and dark minerals and small rock 

fragments of various grain sizes. The light and dark materials were placed in visible layers in the 

“soil” so distortion of stratigraphy could be visually assessed. Most of these test runs were 

conducted on laboratory tabletops. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: Was there a glove box set aside just for simulations for that reason?

ALLTON: Final test runs were conducted inside of a nitrogen glovebox used for testing. The 

extrusion and dissection hardware was thoroughly cleaned before being placed into a lunar sample 

glovebox. The extrusions required three people in the gloves and a reader for each step of the 

procedure. We needed to work well together to assemble the intricate pieces because helpers 

would be required to hold hardware in position with tweezers while fasteners were attached, etc. 

Our goal was to be as coordinated as a pit crew in the Indianapolis 500. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: I was reading your article about the Apollo 11 core. I thought it was interesting 

how they had opened part of the cores from 11, but then you went back and did some more work 

on it. Why was that the case? What did you learn that was different from when they looked at it 

in ’69 when you did it later?
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ALLTON: The Apollo 11 drives tube samples were the first cores that I dissected, in 1978. They 

had previously been opened in the Biological Preparations Laboratory as a requirement for 

biohazard testing. This was done in a temporary facility to acquire preliminary images and remove 

half of the core material under nitrogen. The remaining half cores, still in their original inner half 

tube, were stored until I dissected the remaining portions. I have forgotten what I wrote!

ROSS-NAZZAL: It’s very specific, I know. I just thought it was fascinating. Your article was really 

interesting, about the mix-up of where these were, which one it was, and the boxes that they got 

put in. It was just a really interesting article. How they used aluminum foil to keep it in the core, 

and how it reshaped the core a little bit. I just read this, so that’s why I have a little bit more detail.

ALLTON: Send me back to research it.

ROSS-NAZZAL: No, it’s fine, I just wondered if that was something that stuck out in your memory. 

Were there differences between the cores that you looked at, between 11, 15, 16, and 17? Or were 

they all fairly similar in terms of what you were looking for?

ALLTON: They cores are expected to be different in composition and texture because they were 

taken in unique locations. The biggest difference from a dissection viewpoint is that the Apollo 

11 cores were in two-cm diameter drive tubes that had already been opened and half the soil 

removed without detailed documentation. In one core, the soil was not confined and slid around 

a little inside the tube. In contrast, the remaining cores that I opened were in four-cm drive tubes, 
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carefully extruded and documented in detail. The Apollo 15 core that I did was a double, samples 

15010/15011. It was on the edge of Hadley Rille, which was a rocky basalt surface. Consequently

the lower tube had a rock that big in the bottom [demonstrates], which pretty much would have 

had to rotate to get slipped in this way because it wouldn’t have gotten in crosswise.

The reason I could spend three months digging through something at a very slow pace is 

that it was always a possibility there would be something new and exciting in the next scoopful. 

To sieve the particles and take a look at them in the microscope was a delight. For example there 

were beautiful glass beads of different colors, mostly green on 15. I did not do any 17, but that’s 

where the orange glass beads were.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I was curious about that one, too.

ALLTON: The Apollo 16 core I dissected had more visible layering, the abundant white plagioclase 

contributed to greater color differences. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: As you are working through these cores, how are you keeping track of what it is 

you’re finding? You’re in the glove box so you’re obviously not taking out your hands every time 

to document and write. How did you keep track of what you found?

ALLTON: No, we took our hands out and wrote.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Did you? Oh, okay.
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ALLTON: I think they’re a little better at it these days. We have an upgraded experimental cabinet. 

We can take pictures, and of course it’s all electronic now. I don’t favor electronic note-taking 

because it’s like filling out the form. What you want to say never fits that form exactly. We did a 

lot of drawing of features we observed.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That definitely added to the amount of time it took to go through the core.

ALLTON: Yes. Besides, I liked looking at it.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Were there other people that were working with you on those cores as you were 

going through? Or that was your project for those months?

ALLTON: There’s very few people who have dissected lunar soil cores, working at most two core 

gloveboxes simultaneously. Those who have include myself, Stewart Nagel, Stephen [R.] Waltz, 

and Carol [M.] Schwarz. If I were working on a core, that would be my core, and I wouldn’t want 

the other person to come in and dig in it. Same thing would apply to their core. We interpreted 

what we saw probably a little bit differently, but then this was a basic characterization. I think 

researchers understood that. The science from the cores samples came from the detailed analysis

by investigators, measuring the changing chemistry with each little increment of depth in the soil.

ROSS-NAZZAL: One of the other things I had read that you worked on was preparing samples for 

PIs. Wondering if you could talk about how you did that. How did you decide which samples? 

Was that something that they proposed? They wanted rock, whatever the title was at that point? 
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Or did you get to decide which sample they would receive, and how did you go about making that 

decision?

ALLTON: The decision was technically not mine. If it were for a returned sample, I would browse

through the database and look for something that I thought would fit this researcher’s requirements. 

We would just make that suggestion to the oversight committee, and they would have a discussion 

based on the science merits. They had a fairly detailed database and knew how much of the 

different kinds of samples were available. They still do it that way today. Their recommendations 

have to be signed off at [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, DC], but they pretty much agree with 

the committee’s assessment.

For new samples, the committees had a better handle on the chemistry of the different rock 

types, because all of them were also investigators. That’s important, I think. They knew the 

samples. They knew the analytical sensitivity requirements that would be required to get 

meaningful results. 

Today when planning for Mars sample return, assembling the right sets of people to set 

worthwhile, workable analytical requirements is difficult. One, because it’s such a long time 

period between setting requirements and analyzing the samples. But in Genesis [Discovery 

Program], the people that decided how clean the collectors had to be were actually the people that 

were going to make the analyses. They had the instruments to verify a collector was clean enough 

to do this.

It is more of a challenge when you have a ten- or twenty-year project. You’re pulling in 

people with a more biological bent that we had after Apollo had matured a little bit, and you cannot 
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know the sample characteristics until you actually bring something back. But it’s critical if you 

have people in the loop that understand the detailed chemistry and petrology of planetary samples.

Those outside committees comprised of actual sample researchers would know which 

rocks to choose, the history of all the analyses that had been done on it, and understand how it all 

fits together to make a picture.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s quite a bit of knowledge contained in one human being’s brain.

ALLTON: Yes.

ROSS-NAZZAL: What about museums and other places that would make requests for lunar 

samples? Would you also pull those, or work with people who were working on exhibits?

ALLTON: That process for making requests for museum display samples was channeled through 

JSC Public Affairs Office. They needed different information to evaluate the benefits of allocating 

a sample for public display. This included descriptions of the display and context, the expected 

audience, and a security plan. After meeting the PAO requirements, the request would be 

forwarded to the lunar sample curator for presentation to the oversight advisory committee 

(depending on the date called LSAPT, LAPST, the Lunar and Planetary Sample Team, or the 

CAPTEM, the Curation Analysis Planning Team for Extraterrestrial Materials, the current 

committee name and function). 

While researchers would typically request a specific sample by sample number from a 

catalog, museum requests would likely focus on type of sample, such as basalt or breccia from a 
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specific Apollo site, and allow the curator to make recommendations. Usually the sample chosen 

was a subsample of a large, homogenous rock. This approach still leaves a lot of material for 

science. Breccias, for instance, vary quite a bit internally, since they are comprised of impactgenerated rock fragments that could be from anywhere on the Moon. You could inadvertently use 

up something that might be extremely valuable in those kind of rocks. There are probably a few 

breccia displays, and these would be mounted in cases that could be recalled for further research. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: In your resume you also talked about how you helped set up a Class-100 cosmic 

dust tunnel. That was something that you did after you came here to JSC. What is a cosmic dust 

tunnel? I think that’s probably the first thing people will want to know.

ALLTON: The tunnel is a description of the clean laboratory where we handle cosmic dust. “Cosmic 

Dust” is our nickname for interplanetary dust that falls on the Earth. It falls through the 

atmosphere. We collect it with two types of high-altitude aircraft. It started with derivatives of 

the [Lockheed] U-2, now flown on the ER-2 from Armstrong Flight Research Center [Edwards 

Air Force Base, California] and the [Martin] B-57s [Canberras], now flown from Ellington 

[Airport, Houston, Texas], that are going to go chase the solar eclipse in a couple weeks

ROSS-NAZZAL: Yes, that’s very exciting.

ALLTON: Curation has had a long relationship flying collectors for “cosmic dust” on the WB-57s. 

The cosmic dust collected consists of particles shed by comets or asteroids that fall to earth. These 

sometimes intersect Earth’s atmosphere at high velocity and become molten small spheres. 
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Sometimes they just float through the atmosphere, and they arrive still looking like fluffy grains, 

more like their original cometary composition. The WB-57s fly around at high altitude, in the 

lower stratosphere, exposing gooey plates to capture ten-micron particles. The collection plates 

are only opened at high altitude, where there are very few earth-generated particles. That way the 

plates do not get so contaminated that the cosmic particles are obscured. Other particles, derived 

from spacecraft engines or an energetic volcanic eruption, sometimes accumulate on the plates in 

small amounts and require chemical analysis to identify. One set of plates may be exposed for 

cumulative flying time over several weeks. 

I was involved in establishing an ultra-clean lab to prepare clean collection plates for flight 

and to examine plates recovered from the aircraft containing the dust particles. We set up a clean 

room that had a whole wall of HEPA [high-efficiency particulate air] filters setting up a horizontal 

flow Class 100, ISO Class 5, cleanroom which we called a tunnel. The dust was picked from the 

plates using a glass needle right in front of the filter bank, so the cleanliness was in practice Class 

10, ISO Class4. The gowning requirements for working in the Cosmic Dust Lab was a full bunny 

suit, complete head cover with only the eyes exposed, gloves, and booties, I never did any particle 

picking, but helped establish the Class-100 tunnel. That was our first laminar flow room that we 

put in for curation. Don [Donald E.] Brownlee from the University of Washington in Seattle first 

showed these particles could be captured from the stratosphere. We also visited the interplanetary 

dust handling facility at Washington University in St. Louis [Missouri] and received advice on lab 

design from both groups. The JSC Cosmic Dust Lab was established in 1981. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: What was the reason behind collecting all this material? Do you know what it 

was eventually going to be used for in terms of scientific research?
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ALLTON: Samples of comets or asteroidal dust—at first they were called Brownlee particles. I 

can remember Don [Donald E.] Brownlee on stage in the JSC Teague Auditorium talking about 

Brownlee particles. That’s probably the first year I was here. The science was way over my head, 

and he looked so young. He was the one that proposed collecting those particles with high altitude 

aircraft. 

NASA collaborated and took over the operation of the airplanes and setting up the lab. The 

particles are allocated just like lunar samples, requiring sample requests and committee review 

before approval. This open access enabled Brownlee and other researchers access to samples for 

analysis and use the composition results to make predictions about interplanetary dust sources. 

Some dust grain results are correlated with specific meteor showers or comets. There are some 

estimates of a couple of tons of cosmic dust falling on the Earth each day worldwide. The dust 

collection at JSC is a very, very, very small subset, but a subset in which detailed chemistry can 

be precisely measured. A ten-micron grain can be divided among several research groups with 

different expertise and instruments enabling comprehensive characterization.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s quite a bit.

ALLTON: Yes, it is an impressive number. Some of the particles collected are orbital debris,

exhaust from rockets that gets lofted up that high. The lab workers who pick particles from the 

gooey plates have an eye for cosmic dust versus rocket exhaust. Once picked, then the workers 

mount the particle for SEM [scanning electron microscope] screening, resulting in a good mugshot 

with the SEM and a little bit of chemistry. They publish catalogs using SEM data so researchers 
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can shop for particles meeting their particular research requirements and request that particle. In 

all the curatorial collections, we still do basic characterization of samples and publish the results 

so researchers world-wide can access samples through requests and peer-review. We still do the 

equivalent of the Apollo PET to promote wise use of limited samples for best research. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: I noticed you had worked on some of those catalogs.

ALLTON: I don’t remember working on cosmic dust catalogs, maybe I helped with the database 

or something. I have written lunar core catalogs, historical summaries of the way Apollo samples 

were handled, and in recent years lunar and planetary science abstracts describing Genesis solar 

wind sample processing and sample status.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You have a lengthy publication record, that’s for sure.

ALLTON: It’s interesting. Brownlee—he was the Stardust PI for the mission that went and directly 

collected particles in aerogel from Comet Wild 2 and returned those samples to the Stardust Lab. 

The Stardust Lab is separate from the Cosmic Dust Lab. Cosmic dust is a random mix of stuff that 

happens to fall on the Earth.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I was curious if you could talk about how procedures have changed since you 

started there, if they have at all. If things have changed or the facilities changed. Obviously there 

was the annex that was built in ’79 and opened. I don’t know if you want to talk about some of 

those changes, or if things have been pretty consistent over the years.
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ALLTON: I have two comments on that. We’re charged with tracking every little milligram and 

grain of lunar material, you might know that. Our other collections also have to be documented. 

Back, about maybe the late ’70s, we got audited. People from Arthur Andersen [LLP] 

came. The curator at the time, Pat [Patrick] Butler [Jr.], said, “Just cooperate with everybody that’s 

coming.” They gave us a report that made some constructive suggestions on how to close the loop 

on tracking the materials internally and how to audit the samples accurately. I think that improved

tracking, and a lot of new procedures came out of that in terms of database modifications. The 

database double-checked the amount of material before and after processing lunar samples. When 

sample transfers were made within curation, the database kept track of who initiated the transfer,

who received the sample, and issued notices if the transfers did not match.

That one audit that went into a lot of details. Those suggestions were taken to heart, and I 

think greatly improved our tracking capability. I know some folks were still bent out of shape by 

being interviewed by the auditors, because I guess being grilled was not something they were used 

to. Nothing bad happened to anyone, and we actually, I think, came out of it better with a good 

set of procedures. The procedures that we have today follow that tradition, with how we document 

what we do and archive all the changes that happen. I’m thinking the changes are coming now as 

we try and bring more labs online, in more of a hurry than I would like to work. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s interesting. Were you interviewed as well by Arthur Andersen? Do you 

remember that?
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ALLTON: No, I was not interviewed. I didn’t know anything significant and they didn’t talk to 

me.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I wonder if you would talk about the building of 31 North. I understand that was 

a big undertaking and you actually had to do dry runs to move the samples and pack the samples, 

make sure that they were safely packed. I was looking through some of the curatorial newsletters. 

People, secretaries, technicians—a lot of people—were in the facility on their hands and knees 

cleaning at one point before everything got moved in. I was curious what your memories are of 

that effort and those first couple of months moving in there.

ALLTON: The effort was really good. I think it’s a landmark. It was more than a couple months. 

The samples were removed from the Lunar Receiving Lab because it wasn’t set up to keep samples 

clean—that tension between “contained” and “clean,” about negative versus positive air pressure, 

sterilization chemicals, animal effluvia. What was good about the 31N facility was the great care 

taken by the oversight by the facility subcommittee of LAPST to produce a clean facility.

The oversight committee was composed of people who wanted to analyze lunar samples,

knew how to do that and recognized contamination sources. Forward thinking curators and 

advisors had ideas for the type of facility needed to preserve the lunar samples, probably starting 

about the time samples were moved into Building 31 as an interim facility in 1973. The facility 

subcommittee started meeting for regular reviews of the plans and subsequent construction about 

1975 and the building was finished in 1979. It was a committee of about five to seven people. 

Most of them were isotopers, people real picky about process details and interested in making sure 

it was done right. Two facility subcommittee members that stand out in my mind are Dimitri [A.] 
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Papanastassiou, formerly of Caltech and JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California],

and JSC’s Lawrence E. Nyquist. Both served on the Facility Subcommittee as tenacious members 

for contamination control and have a continuing genuine interest in astromaterial sample 

preservation, serving on advisory committees up to the present day. Everything that went into 

that building—the floor coverings, the paint, the wires you plugged into the light fixtures—was 

analyzed for chemistry. The subcommittee approved specific construction materials and 

furnishings for the whole building based on the least contaminating chemistry, even though the 

samples were going to be inside the glove box. They did a good job.

So the building looks to me like it did in 1979. I think it’s in pretty good shape. You can 

find some small places requiring more frequent maintenance, but the security is there with the 

vault doors. Cleanliness is robust, achieved by the set up with the high-pressure areas, the storage,

and the buffer area where the samples are transferred into glove boxes. As you go in, suiting up, 

you have to go through six increasing pressure changes. Every time you open the door, the air 

flows out. The air handlers are HEPA filtered. The pristine samples are handled in nitrogen-filled 

gloveboxes, which are monitored for water and oxygen content. It’s a really good building. I 

observed good communications between the facility subcommittee and the curatorial facility 

engineer in obtaining good workmanship and materials from the contractor. JSC facility people 

provided great support for the contractor interfaces.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Did you play any role in some of these discussions? Or perhaps when you started 

to move samples, were you participating in some of these dry runs or discussions about how best 

to pack up samples? Any memories of those days?
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ALLTON: I do have memories of everyone on staff, including the curator Pat Butler, on hands and 

knees wiping down the vault floor with Freon or maybe isopropyl alcohol. It was hot and people 

were wearing summer clothes. We were lined up in a grid, with all behinds oriented in the same 

direction so the entire floor would be wiped. This occurred as we prepared to move samples into 

the building. 

Because I spent a lot of time looking up the chemistry of different materials proposed for 

the new building as the subcommittee requested, in subsequent years people would ask me, 

“What’s in the paint on the door? What’s on the floor covering?” We had good documentation, 

and I could go look it up. That’s why I was aware of that. 

Plus, I could attend the twice-a-year meetings at which the facility subcommittee reported 

to the oversight committee. When they were working on the building, curation furnished an LRL 

veteran building engineer, William A. Parkan, who had an excellent working relationship with the 

subcommittee. I could hear the discussions and witness the resolution of problems in a 

professional atmosphere.

When we moved the samples, we already had the procedures in pretty good shape. There 

was a worry along about that time, that all of the samples shouldn’t be in one basket. So curation

prepared for a remote storage facility, which at that time was going to be at Brooks Air Force Base 

in San Antonio [Texas]. In the meantime, while all that was being set up and deliberately planned, 

there were temporary storage places onsite called interim storage. Samples were packed in a 

certain way. I supplied some of the packaging.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Were you involved at all in that move to take some of the samples and take them 

out to San Antonio out at Brooks?
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ALLTON: Mostly an observer. Curators got a Greyhound [Lines, Inc.] bus whose vibration 

characteristics were less than any other bus they could find. They took out all the seats and 

strapped the isopods containing samples in with seatbelts. My husband, Charles S. Allton,

provided the engineering support securing the isopods in the bus. Sometimes I found out things 

through him.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s funny. I didn’t know about the Greyhound bus, that’s pretty interesting.

ALLTON: They drove in the dark of night at thirty-five miles an hour so they wouldn’t jostle the 

samples, with a security escort.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Thirty-five miles an hour. You all knew that was happening, but they didn’t make 

that announcement at the Center, I imagine.

ALLTON: Right.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s interesting. So you primarily were just doing research during these days.

ALLTON: What would I have been doing? I was probably doing core samples.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: Still exciting work, I think. After you were a research analyst for a few years, you 

became a senior research analyst. I was curious if your role changed at all in any way or you just 

sort of continued—it was just a promotion, a change in salary, things of that nature.

ALLTON: The change in position titles reflects longevity of a willingness to work wherever needed, 

I think. Perhaps an enthusiasm for all projects. I’m just an ordinary person, but I was lucky enough 

to be able to spend a lot of extra time researching topics related to good curation, learning how to 

use Datatrieve [software] to compile sample statistics, collect documents and study photographs 

while compiling the Apollo geology sampling tool catalog, which is much used today by the young 

generation engineers designing tools for our future lunar missions.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You have an archive of all the materials that you have over in Building 31 and 

records related to the building and hardware and all those things?

ALLTON: Yes. Hardware that was built for us through the engineers here onsite—of course they 

had JSC engineering drawings, and we still need to get those from drawing control. We had a 

stash of paper blueprints, but you know what happens to those with time. So our person who’s

currently the archivist tracks those things, and we get copies of our hardware. Because we haven’t 

done a core in a long time, we might need to reconstruct some to open the last cores. I hope we 

know where we put that core equipment, because it’s been a long time since that equipment was

put in storage. But we have copies of the engineering drawings, so equipment could be regenerated. 
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Our archive has copies of many LRL images, but originals for would be the JSC photo 

library. Not all those images are online. Our archivist orders the electronic image files that we 

need for historical purposes. An example would be the images taken as the Apollo 14 sample box 

was packed for flight. Click, click, put something in, take pictures. People will be interested in 

how that box was packed. I think the record is in the pictures, although there are a lot of written 

records as well. 

So what do we have that’s original? In the vault—there’s a data vault—are audio tapes. 

They’re from the early Apollo days. We did have a discussion, the archivists and I did, about how 

can we recover what’s on them. I don’t know if you can play them anymore. The audiotape’s

about that wide [demonstrates]. So there is a resource there. 

I would need to check with Debra [L. Baxter] because I know we talked with folks over 

the years what should we do with these. I don’t think there’s transcripts of all those; I think they’re 

real early conversations in the LRL. A lot of the kinescopes from the surface, we had those reels. 

Other people have taken those and made them into VHS [Video Home System] tapes. We 

shouldn’t be the primary repository of that data either, but we do have that. 

What we do have that is unique is the data packs for all the processing done on the rocks. 

“What did it weigh when you started? What did it weigh when you finished?” When you do a 

rock, you put an orientation cube with it. So if this piece got taken off early on, and forty years 

later somebody wants a piece right next to it, we can do that. You can do that with big rocks. You 

can’t do that with soil. There’s many linear feet in a fireproof vault. In addition to the datapacks 

for each numbered lunar sample, we have the Lunar Receiving Lab logbooks where the techs 

would log in actions associated with the vacuum chamber and sample gloveboxes. For example, 
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the techs logged the time the Apollo 11 ALSRC was placed into the vacuum glovebox and what 

time they opened it. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s fascinating. So is that something that you would do when you would handle 

samples? You would log those sort of things when you took a sample, were looking at it, or even 

the core? Were you writing all that?

ALLTON: That information is in the sample data packs. You asked about taking my hands out of 

the glove box to write. I’m left-handed for writing. I can do a many sample handling actions with 

either hand, and it helped. Yes, I took many pictures of core dissection. Back when I was doing 

that, we took images using 4x5 cut film which had to be sent to Building 8 for film processing

before we could see if the image was good. We could also take 4x5 black and white Polaroid 

images, and it was these that we made notations with Sharpie markers.

ROSS-NAZZAL: One of the things that I had read was that for a period of time you didn’t open any 

cores, for about six years. I was curious why that was the case. Was that a policy decision? Or 

there was just no need to open those cores for a while?

ALLTON: I’m thinking—I would have to look at what you read. About the time Ronald [W.] 

Reagan became president, they started cutting the budget. A lot of thought was given to 

mothballing certain activities. I think that might be the time period you’re talking about. People 

decided they would not keep opening cores at that rate. That’s the only thing I can think that 

happened. We did have a staff reduction back then.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: It’s a shame. You talked about slabbing breccias for creating new samples. I 

thought that that was fascinating. If you could talk about that. What does that entail, and how do 

you create a new sample?

ALLTON: It’s like raisin bread. Breccias are rocks that contain small clasts of precursor rocks, like 

raisins in bread or fruit in fruitcake. Some of the lunar rocks made by impact have fragments of 

precursor rocks. If you hit something with a high-speed projectile, like the meteors that hit the 

Moon, you’re going to break the rock, you’re going to melt the rock, you’re going to vaporize the 

rock. The pieces get flung far and wide, but some get glued together by molten rock. Over many 

generations of that, you end up with a rock that’s full of pieces that could be from near and far. 

The rock is not homogeneous. There could be a valuable piece hiding in the interior of a breccia. 

All of the large rocks have been photographed and described for characterization purposes. 

If you took a slice off the end of a large breccia, like slicing bread, you would expose new material, 

perhaps a clast type never seen before. So it’s like a new sample. When we slice a breccia 

exposing new clasts, we publish the pictures and optical description by a trained observer so 

researchers would be informed of sample availability. If someone requested a clast, and the request

was approved, the clast could be extracted from the slab of rock that was creating by sawing the 

slice.

We may not have to do that so much anymore because now we’ve got a micro-CT

[computed tomography] scanner. A rock can be imaged and the result is three-dimensional x-ray 

with chemistry, so we’ll be able to see where the pieces are inside of a big rock. We might not 

have to slice so many.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s amazing.

ALLTON: Now they did x-ray the soil cores in the early days to see if they were full of rocks, but 

they were fuzzy images on the early ones. Later ones got a little better. But even so, when you 

collect a core on the Moon and you tamp down the top so it doesn’t slide around, and you bring it 

back, it gets jostled a bit. The main thing is when it sits sideways on the shelf it just sort of settles 

on the end. There is not gross distortion, but it’s obviously not exactly like it was on the Moon.

ROSS-NAZZAL: How did you account for that when you were going through those core samples?

ALLTON: We took better x-rays on those larger cores from the last three missions. Small void

space is often visible on the ends. When the soil is pushed out of the tubes, the void space fills in. 

We just had to be aware that the ends might have been a little bit distorted. 

After the soil is pushed into the receptacle, the fused quartz top is removed and the exposed 

outer one mm of soil is scraped away to remove the soil that came in contact with the anodized 

aluminum tube wall. Anodization process is dirty, relatively speaking, and traces of contamination

were detectable in that outer 1 mm, so we’d take that off. Then we would dig through the core in 

half-centimeter increments and place each subsample into a separate container. 

Subsamples were described with the depth from the top of the core. Finally, a lengthwise 

portion soil of the entire depth profile remained in the receptacle, and this material was removed 

from the nitrogen glovebox and taken to laboratory where the material is preserved in epoxy, some 

of which is prepared as thin sections.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: Sounds like a lot of work.

ALLTON: Hence all those procedures for extrusion, dissection, epoxy preservation, thin section 

preparation. The procedures were annotated as executed. We had a reader and a doer.

ROSS-NAZZAL: How many people were working with you on those?

ALLTON: When we did an extrusion, or any of these specialized things, about three people.

ROSS-NAZZAL: How long did that take?

ALLTON: I think some cores might have been done in a couple months. I was slower than 

everybody else, but I probably ran longer than three months on some of them.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Just enjoyed playing around with them and seeing and enjoying what was in there?

ALLTON: It was a bit tedious physically, too. I’m not going to shovel soil out of the tube really 

fast. That’s just not what you do.

ROSS-NAZZAL: It seems like it’s a very detailed process.

ALLTON: It is and very controlled. For those you pretty much know exactly what was done.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: Were you sharing what you were learning as you were going through these cores? 

On a daily basis were you sharing with the curator, “This is what I found”? Would he come by 

and take a look, or were they just waiting until you finished and you gave a report?

ALLTON: Mostly they were waiting until I finished. But every once in a while I would find 

something really cool and then get somebody to come in and look at it.

ROSS-NAZZAL: What were some of those really cool moments, or really cool things that you 

found?

ALLTON: The thing that comes to mind is something somebody else found. It was a glass bubble 

that was hollow that was this big [demonstrates] in an Apollo 17 core. It had enough metal in the 

glass, it looked like metallic glass. That was a little odd.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Were you speculating on what that could be?

ALLTON: Yes, I don’t remember what the outcome was. I don’t think it was something that 

changed a lot.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You had been there for a while and then you got promoted to a management 

position where you were overseeing about ten folks and a clerk. I was curious how you made that 
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change from a researcher into more of a manager, and what you did to prepare yourself for that 

kind of role.

ALLTON: My basic answer is I don’t recall, but I do know it was a change of pace. I decided I 

couldn’t really concentrate on science kind of things or contamination control kind of things if I 

were to follow that many people and keep up with what they were doing. So I did change how I 

approached that project. I don’t think it lasted that long. One of the people I supervised later 

supervised me, that kind of thing. We’d both been there since ’73 and ’74. It just helps when you 

have people that know a many useful skills.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I guess you work independently quite a bit in that lab, I would think.

ALLTON: Doing cores, yes.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You mentioned earlier about the conference that you went to where there was a 

discussion in the women’s restroom. Are there other conferences that you would attend over the 

years where you recall any interesting events or moments, or some interesting discoveries that 

stand out in your mind, or maybe a presentation that you gave?

ALLTON: Let me just say that the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is key to everybody 

that works in curation. Generally, curation presentations are not research science, but they 

document the samples and the background and the handling that the science guys need to know if 

they’re trying to interpret their data. We go because we need to understand what their needs are, 
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what they consider as contaminants in their samples. We’re trying to preserve samples so good 

science can be done. I’m a big advocate of everybody that’s involved in curation understands the 

science that they’re supporting, as opposed to just reading procedures.

I think that’s paid off over the long term in the LRL in the contractor people. At first in 

the LRL technicians performed the work in the glove boxes. The LRL science observers were 

generally some of the outside scientists. They would just stand and watch; they didn’t put their 

hands in the glove. By the time I got there post-LRL in 1974, the people that were working hands 

in the gloveboxes with the samples were people with master’s degrees in geology or chemistry. 

So they were changing over from a procedure and tech-driven sample handling to more scienceknowledge sample handling. Some of the techs acquired excellent science knowledge and had 

more common sense than the scientists, but that was one change in designation of sample handling 

personnel education requirements.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I find that interesting that you said that lunar curation is not science. I often equate 

it with science. Can you explain that a little more? It’s just documenting, just keeping those 

samples available for researchers at universities and other labs across the country?

ALLTON: I was speaking of competitive science. Most of the people we prepare samples for 

compete on proposals for proposal funding to answer a science question. Many people in the 

curation staff also do that. I don’t, but I’m the odd person out. I pay more attention to 

contamination control and lab operation. These responsibilities require science knowledge and are 

important in sample preservation. The other curators have their own narrowly focused research 

goals and proposals. My interests are broader, and sometimes I make connections between 
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collections that are beneficial. Papers detailing curation handling of samples are important to 

science interpretation.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Okay.

ALLTON: The people that make the science conclusions need to know all that background material. 

We put out the catalogs for many of the collections. Genesis, for instance, we try and write 

abstracts every year that describe how we handle the samples, or what we’re doing. That would 

not be something that would make a publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I see.

ALLTON: But it’s helpful. Besides, if it’s an abstract, then I can always know where to find it. I 

don’t have to worry about it getting lost on an archive shelf. That works out nicely.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You’ve written quite a bit on lunar samples and the cores over the years. You’ve 

been going to the Lunar and Planetary Conferences for years. Have things changed in terms of the 

way people are using these samples and what we’re learning about the Moon, maybe even the 

universe?

ALLTON: There’s been some trends. When we prepare to return to the Moon, and we did that for 

Constellation and are now doing that, there’s engineering interest in doing things on the Moon;

those folks also need to know characteristics of lunar soil. So there were periods when requests 
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were submitted for lunar samples upon which to do technology experiments. Making concrete 

from lunar soil, extracting propellant, and assessing health hazard are examples.

The curator and the advisory committee have primary responsibility to preserve samples 

for planetary science and historically have been stingy when allocating lunar samples. Yet these 

people are uniquely qualified to judge the varying science value of different samples. Historically, 

very small amounts of low-science-value specimens have been allocated—very sparingly—and 

there is not agreement on policy. Examples of a lower science value sample would be dust 

remaining in a transfer bag or a returned sample exposed to the environment. One big difference 

is the amount of lunar sample required for a science versus an engineering experiment. A typical 

lunar sample investigator is used to using, I don’t know, fifty milligrams, but a guy who wants to 

do an engineering study is thinking in kilograms. That’s a mismatch. 

Two things happened to address this issue. One, for special engineering requests, a few 

people with engineering expertise were included in committee deliberations. And two, technology 

people were required to have done some work on a simulant for the purpose of reducing the amount 

of sample needed and also demonstrate that what they were doing, from the engineering 

standpoint, would actually require a lunar sample. The simulant requirement stimulated the lunar 

simulant production efforts.

The other trend would be people that want to do microbiology on the samples. That’s a 

planetary protection interest. But at this point, what microbes would be in there after forty years 

of being handled? Clean is not the same thing as sterile.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: All these terms I’ve never given that much thought to, but I guess I do equate

certain things. You mentioned the lunar simulant, which you were involved in, JSC-1, and was it 

JSC-1A? Can you talk about that and why they were created? What the purpose was behind them?

ALLTON: I think I talked about lunar simulant in a paper in Wendell [W. Mendell]’s book on lunar 

bases [Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century]. Why did I do that? I tried to write 

what characteristics a simulant needs to have, and this was early in the times people started 

thinking about simulant. That’s because I had spent all that time digging in real lunar dirt and 

understood the effects of electrostatic charging and agglutinate physical properties. I think that 

was the outcome of that. Also, I wanted to emphasize the surface changes on lunar grains due to 

solar wind and micrometeorite impacts. These changes affect chemical reactivity, and these 

changes are not reproducible in simulants on even a modest scale.

The other thing that I can recall—when they were looking for larger volumes of simulant,

especially to support the engineering studies, Charlie [Charles S. Allton] and I were on vacation 

in Arizona near Sunset Craters [Volcano National Monument]. One of my USGS colleagues

suggested Merriam Crater when I asked about basaltic composition volcanic cinder sources. 

So Charlie and I drove to Merriam Crater and talked to the guys running the bulldozers and 

brought back samples. I did a little bit with finding out how we could get the stuff sieved to small 

grain size. The good thing about that material was tiny vesicles in the volcanic glass. When 

broken, it has sharp little edges like the agglutinates that really form in lunar soil. The chemistry 

is grossly right.

One problem from a large-scale production if simulant is that the average grain size of 

lunar soil is about seventy microns, which is pretty fine. Getting material sieved that fine, that is 
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not as easy as one would think. Carlton Allen stepped in and facilitated involvement of James [L.] 

Carter in UT [University of Texas] Dallas. They got involved in actually doing the logistics to 

make it work and getting funding to do all that. It came from this crater out in Arizona.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s fascinating. I thought it was interesting, I’d never heard of a lunar soil 

simulant before. I wonder if you would talk about technology and how technology has changed 

since you worked out at the lab. I imagine when you first started working there, computers were 

very large, if you used them at all. You mentioned those magnetic tapes. Maybe you could talk 

about the database that you used, and how that’s evolved over time.

ALLTON: You’re right, technology has changed a lot. The original lunar inventories were on 

seven- or eight-track tapes like that [demonstrates]. I don’t know if those can now be read. They’re 

a little later tape than the old LRL audiotapes somebody recorded.

I’m thinking when I first started working there they were still using punch cards and maybe 

Fortran taken to Building 12, but I’m not sure. Subsequently, the curation computer was in a room

and the programming was Datatrieve. I could actually figure out enough to pull up data for 

different sample sizes. I spent some time figuring out the size distribution they raked up on the 

different missions and such like that, because I thought that was a science question.

When we went to individual workstations, I could not keep up with programming. When 

we started adding meteorites, and cosmic dust was probably next, we had: lunar, meteorite, cosmic 

dust, Genesis, Stardust, Hayabusa, microparticle. We’ve got seven right now.

What we want is all of those databases to be on the same platform so the same IT 

[information technology] people don’t have seven different systems. Transitioning to a common 
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platform is a work in progress. Genesis is an outlier because ours is done by a different group 

onsite. That was an experiment in contracting out the database.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I can imagine.

ALLTON: It’s worked well for us. In the end it needs to all go back together. People consistently 

underestimate the resources it takes to track all that stuff. Everybody seems to think it’s so easy.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I think people tend to underestimate a lot of things. They think something’s going 

to be very easy, but you have to plan and think about users in the future and all those things.

ALLTON: You reminded me that the new thinking is to put more sample data online, including 

analytical results. That is an overwhelming task.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s the way everyone is moving these days, everything online, everything 

accessible. One of the articles that I had taken a look at, and I thought was interesting was your 

study of Apollo tools and containers. Why was that study undertaken at that point?

ALLTON: I was doing a stint as archivist then, and I’m a lousy archivist. I’m not organized, but I 

did realize that some of the stellar lunar scientists were getting old and retiring and passing away. 

So about that time that person who was curator, who asked me to be the archivist, wanted me to 

write that tool catalog.
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That was fun. Most of that catalog was done from sample datapack research and lunar 

surface photographs because the flight manifests did not list items inside of outer containers. It

was geological sampling tools and containers because I wanted to capture the material 

composition, how it was finished, because that information is essential to knowing what 

contaminants might be in samples. I also had access to the drawings, so I could look up the specific 

compounds and alloys and make estimates of the volume and the weight that was on some of the 

packing list.

That catalog was used more than I ever thought. Because about the time I finished, five or 

ten years later, they started the Constellation [Program], to go back to the Moon. We had a whole 

new generation of young engineers who had not made or flown any Apollo hardware. They wanted 

to know the weight, volume, how you do those things, the boxes, and the core tubes. So the catalog 

was used by a lot of people; it still is I think. One day I got a call from [Astronaut] Alan [L.] Bean, 

he wanted a copy.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Oh, isn’t that nice?

ALLTON: I thought, “Yes, sir, I can send you one.” He was wanting it for his painting.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I can imagine that would be really helpful. That’s really nice. I think I used it in 

December. I got a call from the Legal Office when the Neil [A.] Armstrong—that [lunar sample 

return] bag showed up. That was an interesting one.
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ALLTON: Not in my catalog, I swear I did not find that. I had not seen one like that. I searched 

through our archives. We asked everybody who was around back in those days. My husband 

Charlie works in Crew Systems. He and a colleague went through the closets in the soft goods, 

spent several hours. “No, we don’t have anything like that.” So I said, “I don’t think that’s genuine 

lar bag.”

But then they did the last thing. They did a tape pull, put that in the SEM, and there was 

lunar grains on it. One of our young guys, I’m so proud of him. He went and dug up the 

photographic documentation for that.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Oh, good.

ALLTON: Kind of bad the way that turned out in court. But I felt like we’ve got a new generation 

of somebody who likes digging in old records and learning this history.

ROSS-NAZZAL: How did you get picked to be the archivist? Is that a position that you take turns 

doing over there?

ALLTON: I think I was the first one. The curator just gave me a fancy title, and I took it.

ROSS-NAZZAL: It sounds like an interesting job.

ALLTON: It was, because I got to look through all those Lunar Receiving Lab records. I think I 

got it because they didn’t have anything else to do with me. I had been working on a flight 
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instrument for Jim [James L.] Gooding and that ran out of money. I wasn’t doing curation that 

much at that time, but once I went around talking to people I discovered such a gold mine of stories.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Yes, we’ve got to figure out how we can collaborate together on those interviews. 

Maybe we can make them accessible, see about getting some of them transcribed. Even the 

cafeteria one.

ALLTON: I’d like to do that. I made a list of some people I talked to. 

ROSS-NAZZAL: That can be something that we could look at and see if that were a possibility. Be 

nice to make them available, because I’m sure there’s some great information in there.

ALLTON: I didn’t ask good questions like you did. They rose to the occasion. The interviewees 

certainly recognized the historic importance of their participation and told me great stories with 

similar themes.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Hey, that’s great, and they’re not around for us to talk to. That would be a good

partnership. We’ll have to talk more about that, I think that’d be good. You also worked on some 

parts of the Solar Max [Maximum Mission] satellite, which I thought was interesting.

ALLTON: Yes.

ROSS-NAZZAL: How did you get involved in that? That’s a little different than lunar curating.
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ALLTON: We curated the blankets from Solar Max. They were scanning the microcrater 

populations. Herb [Herbert A.] Zook was the PI on that and the tech was Jack [L.] Warren. It was 

kind of a tech job of scanning. I just did the logistics stuff; I think I drafted the paper.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You were the main writer on that.

ALLTON: Oh, really? It was a documentation really, of a survey. Herb put the science in it—what 

the populations were based on our crater counts and the direction that the blankets were facing, 

what that told us about orbital debris population in orbit. We curate those pieces. We’ve got items 

from several things that spent time in space, and they collected micrometeorite impacts. In some 

of those you can get the chemistry of the impactor, so it gives you a feel for the identity of the 

source population. Not all of it is orbital debris. Some of it is micrometeorites. 

Think we have Palapa and Westar blankets. We might have Mir. I haven’t done that in a 

long time so I’ve kind of lost track. We had Genesis and Stardust capsules. The Stardust capsule 

is at the Smithsonian, and the Genesis capsule is still at JSC but not very presentable after the 

crash.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I think those would be interesting to talk about. You got involved at some point 

working on the Mars Rover Sample Return project. How did you get involved in that effort?

ALLTON: That was a 1980s effort, as I recall. You mentioned JPL. If I were going to speak about 

JPL, the interactions during Genesis would be more meaningful to me. I attended MRSR [Mars 
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Rover and Sample Return] meetings from the curation point of view, when they talked about 

“What kind of samples do you want and how do you get it back?” Since I was familiar with the 

drills used on the Moon; drills and sample containers was the expertise I contributed to that 

discussion.

As I recall, JPL had some advanced technology money. We tried to figure out how dust 

interfered with container seals here for one project. They also had two big contractors, Lockheed

Martin [Corp.] was one and TRW [Inc.] was another. They had different suggestions for what the 

spacecraft should consist of. I tried to keep all those notes. We should have a lot of that in our 

archive. They’re not totally complete. They’re what people had in their office, and we just scarfed 

up when they retired.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Still valuable though, as you know, being the archivist over there.

ALLTON: Yes. We’d have a fair start if you wanted to do the history of Mars Rover Sample

Return. Mars sample return has been in work for—that was in the 1980s I think when I did that. 

It was my first look at watching engineers and scientists work together. That’s probably the most 

interesting thing that needs to be solved in return.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Can you elaborate on that?

ALLTON: MRSR, that was a fairly congenial group. That was my first look at the engineers saying, 

“Well, what are the requirements? We can design anything. What are the requirements? What 
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do you require this piece of hardware to do?” Scientists often have difficulty setting a practical 

requirement, especially when they need to make cutting-edge measurements.

Somewhere in the middle is an optimum compromise. The more complex spacecraft 

mechanisms, the more risk it will not work reliably—reliability versus returning a sample that’s 

worth analyzing. That’s always an interesting dance of watching how they arrive at something in 

the middle. At least the science people tend to stake out very rigorous conditions. I guess it’s just 

a bargaining point. I wasn’t used to that.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Was that the case with the Mars Rover Sample Return?

ALLTON: Yes. I did put in my two cents’ worth. They started to define a Mars rover of a 

Volkswagen variety, but it grew into a Cadillac and got too expensive, so no rover was built for 

MRSR. That’s the basic story there.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You also, I had read, worked on packaging of Martian samples. You had worked 

with lunar samples. What impact did that have on your decision about what you can do with 

Martian samples and how they should be packaged and handled?

ALLTON: Oh, that’s a bit tricky, because the Martian samples we do have, the meteorites, I have 

not personally worked with. And the meteorites that come from Antarctica are not handled quite 

as rigorously as lunar samples, because they’ve already fallen on the Earth.

ROSS-NAZZAL: You came up with a brochure for handling these samples.
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ALLTON: I sent that out. Yes, there’s a packaging industry, and I was plugged into them. I thought,

“Well, I’ll just ask their leaders what we should do,” and I got lots of suggestions. That’s back 

when we were looking at your soda can thing, what it takes to seal a soda can. It can hold ninety

psi [pounds per square inch] pressure, which is quite a lot for not much weight. I got a number of 

replies that were very creative, but that’s all I did with that. The curator was aware of it. We 

didn’t make any PR [public relations] thing out of it. It was generally people who found that an 

interesting intellectual challenge. They had an idea, and they’d draw it up. It wasn’t high-paid 

graphics. It was people sitting down with pencil and paper.

ROSS-NAZZAL: It sounded like you were getting a step further, “How are we going to do this?” 

The next step, if we’re going to get samples and bring them back.

ALLTON: I’m trying to recall what some of them were. They had to do with canning, was one of 

them. They were certainly worth looking at. I probably have those somewhere.

ROSS-NAZZAL: When you retire, you’ll have to go through your records and donate those or keep 

them with the collection over in Building 31. I wanted to ask you a little bit more about those 

interviews that you did with some of the planetary scientists. Do you remember some of the people 

you interviewed?

ALLTON: I wrote that down. I looked that up today. Where’d I put them?
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ROSS-NAZZAL: I was curious who some of those folks might be.

ALLTON: Down here at the bottom. There are several. I went around with my own tape recorder. 

I talked to these people. Elbert [A.] King [Jr.] was done. Joe [Joseph N.] Tatarewicz was in town. 

Do you know him?

ROSS-NAZZAL: No, that name doesn’t ring a bell.

ALLTON: He’s more of an official historian. I think he lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. He wrote 

[Exploring the Solar System: The Planetary Sciences Since Galileo]. That was my first experience 

with a professional recorder of stories. He came by, talked to somebody, and I said, “Oh, I know 

him, let’s go talk to him together.” 

We interviewed Elbert King. I think I have a couple transcripts from this that he had done 

and shared. We were both recording it. I had my own notes, and his was high quality. But that’s 

not all. I think it might only be Elbert King and maybe Jerry [Gerald J.] Wasserburg. I’ll have to 

look. 

John [R.] Bagby [Jr.] is interesting. He was the head of the Interagency Committee on 

Back Contamination, back when they were arguing over whether the Lunar Receiving Lab had to 

contain things or not. The head of the Public Health Service was David [J.] Sencer; Bagby was 

the deputy and the spokesperson, so when I met him we collaborated on an LRL paper in ’96. I 

had forgotten I talked to him. These are folks which I have transcripts of a couple tapes of some, 

and there’s three extra tapes I haven’t figured out who they are.
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Richard [S.] Johnston and Rich [Richard A.] Wright, I don’t know if I can find that. I do 

have notes. That was 1993. These people were part of a storytelling effort where my friend Kay 

[W.] Tobola who got me into storytelling—she was a NASA education person. They hired a 

professional storyteller to come sit and interview these people. So there’s video of these taken by 

Jacobs [Engineering Group, Inc.]. 

It’s in a format that may or may not be so useful, but I do have transcripts of David [S.] 

McKay, Don [Donald D.] Bogard, who has some of the most interesting stories. That’s where I 

got a lot of good ones from. Jack Warren was the tech that opened the first Apollo rock box. I’d 

known him for years. He retired back three or four years ago. I have him on a tape too, but you 

guys interviewed him as well.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Yes, we’ve interviewed him.

ALLTON: Everett [K.] Gibson, Gary [E.] Lofgren. I was just a test subject to test out the process.

ROSS-NAZZAL: That’s quite a lot. There’s some good history of the materials and the folks 

working up there, that’s great.

ALLTON: I was hoping Beth Horner could take that and tell stories that would really be effectively 

told. I think somehow or other the contract she had with Jacobs didn’t allow her to do that with 

them, which is odd. And Kay didn’t get releases from these people.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Ah, that could be a challenge.
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ALLTON: I’m not sure I did either back in ’93. So I don’t know if that can be worked retroactively 

or not. They exist, so people could—my view is they could come to the archives and do what they 

wanted to with them.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I’d have to investigate that, but I’m sure we could figure something out.

ALLTON: By the time we did these, I knew we needed releases, but I just couldn’t be persuasive 

enough to get that done. David McKay has passed away, but his widow is still living.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I’m sure that you could probably ask the family for a release. We’ll have to figure 

that out. It’d be nice if you could release some of that work that you’ve done. I’m sure there’s a 

lot of good detail that people don’t know much about.

ALLTON: Yes. Bogard’s stories are good. You’ve talked to Everett, you know his stories are all 

good.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I think everyone’s interesting when we sit down and talk with them. They’ve all 

got good information, good stories.

ALLTON: Bogard told me the Ross Taylor story, and that he was in the Gas Analysis Lab. How 

they could figure out the rocks were old. Going into that, I put together a story I have told to 

storytelling groups. That when the Moon rocks arrived at the LRL, Harold [C.] Urey and Gene 
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[Eugene M.] Shoemaker were there. Harold Urey had predicted Moon rocks to be old, Gene 

Shoemaker thought they would be young and volcanic. The rock box was opened, and some rocks

looked volcanic, so Harold Urey went home. 

Then when Ross Taylor and the people in the Gas Analysis Lab fessed up to the LSAPT 

committee, that they could calculate the rocks were old, and they weren’t supposed to do that. 

Somebody ran out of the LSAPT room to telephone Urey and said, “Harold, come back, they’re 

old.” I mean who knows how true that is, but I think the tone of the whole story probably is.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I’m sure there was a lot of competition between scientists at that point. It’s 

interesting. We have a few minutes. I wanted to ask you about your own research. You’ve done 

some historical research. You’ve written about The Little White Church on NASA Road 1 [From 

Rice Farmers to Astronauts, A Centennial History, 1893-1993]. What interested you in writing 

that book, and then also interweaving some NASA history with the church history?

ALLTON: The first one is easy. It was the hundredth anniversary of that church. So we thought 

“Well, we’ll write the history.” We interviewed older people in the church, and they all told great 

stories. The other thing is [Astronauts] John [H.] Glenn [Jr.], Buzz Aldrin went to that church, 

Jerry [Gerald P.] Carr. So a lot of members of the church were actively involved in the space 

program, and they shared their stories, especially Buzz’s story about Communion on the Moon. 

What role does a religious base form in exploration? That was a little lunar community 

church thing. Was not really a theological article, it was cultural. “How do you tie back to the 

culture you came from?” A lot of people I would—this is guesswork on my part—under stress 
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and isolation like space travel, might find comfort in religious and cultural ties to their homeland. 

That was the driver for making those connections and then using the stories I had at hand.

The [Charles A.] Murray and [Catherine B.] Cox book [Apollo: Race to the Moon], which 

quotes a lot of people from our church.

ROSS-NAZZAL: It’s a great book.

ALLTON: Dick [Richard H.] Koos sat down and wrote a piece to glue in the copy that’s in our 

church library. He talked about the role, just being able to sit in Sunday services and have a period 

to reflect, which allowed him to come to grips with some of the hard decisions that had been 

discussed or argued over the previous week. So I thought that that might have been the case with 

many of the people that were making Apollo decisions, not just astronauts. I thought maybe there 

was a role.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I thought it was an interesting article, giving some thought about that.

ALLTON: Wendell got somebody in sociology to review it before he put it in his book.

ROSS-NAZZAL: I wonder if you want to review your notes and see if there’s anything we haven’t 

talked about, or if there’s something more you think we should talk about in terms of the lunar 

curation and your involvement and maybe processes or procedures. I know I wanted to come back 

and talk to you about Genesis, and now I know I need to ask you about Stardust as well.
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ALLTON: No, most of these were tagged from what you asked here. The only thing that I thought 

of—I thought back over the time I worked here, “What did I come away learning in terms of what 

advice would I give for future efforts?” So I collected some thoughts on that.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Do you want to share those now? Or would you like to talk about those the next 

time we come?

ALLTON: It’s kind of long, let’s see. Discussing things now, the advantages of sample return are 

many. If I could advertise something, that would be it, because it lets more people be involved in 

making analytical measurements and participating in the science. With more people with different 

ideas and different instruments, you can confirm science results or refute them. This is better 

science. You can’t do that very well robotically or in situ. You need samples here. Socially, it’s 

just good to involve more people in participating in this exploration.

You get state-of-the-art instruments, you can do complex sample preparation. I guess the 

main thing is you can recover from mess-ups like the Genesis crash. So sample return is very 

important. I’m not the only one that says that, but if I had a free soapbox that’s what I would talk 

about.

ROSS-NAZZAL: Those are important, and you know because you worked with them on a regular 

basis. I thank you for coming by today, and I will send you an e-mail about getting together again 

to talk about Genesis and Stardust.

ALLTON: If you want the names of the people I have that.
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ROSS-NAZZAL: Yes, I will.

[End of interview]