Gasoline primer

[hot_pastrami]

Originally Posted by marichiko

One of his theories (which had no basis in the evidence available at the time) was that the first lunar landing would result in the space craft being buried under hundreds of feet of loose dust which he postulated covered the surface of the moon. We all know how correct he was on that one.

Well, according to an interview with Thomas Gold (linked by UT here), this was not true. He says he made a statement which was miscontrued, and then spun the wrong way by his opponents:

I concluded that very fine-grained material seemed likely on the lunar surface. The opposition believed that everything was volcanic - that the moon was enormously volcanic at one time even though now one can't see the littlest volcano on it. They said the flat plains are just lava fields and flows. They got NASA to train the astronauts in the lava fields near Flagstaff; when the astronauts came back, they said they hadn't seen any ground that was anything like the area in which they trained.

What happened, to my great annoyance, was that the other side wanted to ridicule me before the landing by saying, We think it's all hard stuff but Gold thinks you're going to sink out of sight the moment you step onto the surface. It was completely a slander. As I had written, when I step out of a plane in Denver I'm stepping onto a mile of fine granular material - because it all washed out from the mountains - and I don't sink out of sight. I would not have worked on a camera to go to the moon if I had thought it was not going to work. But it was published that Gold says when they step off the ladder they will sink out of sight. And newspapermen, as you probably know, read other newspapers, and these things tend to propagate.