FIRST PERSON BURIED ON THE MOON

FIRST SCIENTIST WHO DIED ON EARTH BUT WAS BURIED ON THE MOON
           Article written by John P. Riley, Jr., Smithsonian, October 1999, pp26-28

The late Krafft A. Ehricke, a rocket designer, proposed that the most important events in the history of Earth occurred when plants started to metabolize sunlight and when human beings began to metabolize information. The third, he wrote in 1985, would happen when human beings evaded the restrictions of living in a finite world by colonizing other worlds. This "extraterrestrial imperative" was crucial, he believed, and would happen in three steps: Space industrialization, space urbanization and, finally, "extraterrestrialization," a mouthful meaning the inevitable divergence of people living on the Moon, Mars and other planets and Moons. In a symbolic way, in the form of one man's ashes, the migration has begun.

EUGENE SHOEMAKER was an American geologist who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey most of his life. He single-handedly founded the field of Astrogeology in 1961 starting when scientists could not agree on whether most of the moon's craters resulted from impacts or volcanism. By showing conclusively that the 4,000-foot-wide crater near Winslow, Arizona, was formed by the impact of a meteorite, he catapulted forward the study of lunar craters (most are now believed to be the result of impacts). The hole in the ground in Arizona is today known as Meteor Crater. Shoemaker was interested in anything that could hit a planet or a moon. He surveyed the near-earth objects. In the process, he and his wife, Carolyn, discovered a number of comets, including the fragmented one named for them and David Levy that crashed into Jupiter in 1994 (Smithsonian, June 1994 and January 1995). He died in 1997 in an automobile accident while he was in Australia, where he was - what else? - studying impact craters. More than anything else, he wanted to go to the moon but medical problem kept him out of the Astronaut corps. NOW HE'S THERE (together with the 354-pound Lunar Prospector NASA  decided to deliberately crash  into one of the moon's polar crater to find water or ice) . For all those people all over the world who have ever wanted to trudge those gray sands and look back at the earth, but will never be astronauts, it's nice to know that one of us made it.