posted 07-10-2025 08:28 AM               

Here is Eric's own biographical sketch from the Journal:

I was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1944 and grew up in the New York suburb of Wantagh, Long Island. I received a B.S. in Astronomy from Caltech in 1966, a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Wisconsin in 1969, and, for the next thirty years, worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on a variety of defense-related programs.

My main area of expertise was in finite-difference simulations of things like atmospheric fireballs, supernova-remnant evolution, and seismic wave propagation. I worked on the dispersal of ejecta from the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact and served on a National Research Council committee which investigated the question of so-called Nuclear Winter.

In 1983, anthropologist Ben Finney and I organized a meeting called Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience and edited a proceedings of the same title which was published by the University of California. In 1984, I participated in a series of meetings on the feasibility of an early return to the Moon and the development of a lunar science base. Combining my interests in history, anthropology, and space, I began a study of terrestrial analogs to lunar settlement and, in 1986-87, took a year-long sabbatical to read economic history at the University of Melbourne and then the University of Alaska-Anchorage. By the end of the year I concluded that first half century of European settlement in Australia (1788-1835) is a pertinent analog because of the high cost of transport from Europe and the reliance of the private sector on import capacity provided by the prison colony. In the lunar case, a science base would play much the same economic role.

In 1988, I visited Houston to learn something about what was involved in getting work done on the Moon. I began reading the Air-to-Ground transcripts and quickly realized that nothing had been done with this amazing resource. During my earlier readings I had become a great fan of a New Zealand historian named J. C. Beaglehole, who had spent most of his long career studying the European exploration of the Pacific and, in particular, producing the definitive editions of Captain Cook's Journals. It was not hard to imagine the Air-to-Ground transcripts forming the basis of an Apollo Journal.

At this time, Jack Schmitt was an occasional visitor to the Laboratory and, on one of his visits, I got an hour of his time to talk about the difficulty of working in the gloves and other issues. We also talked about my Journal idea and, in April 1989, we spent three days together going through part of Apollo 17 EVA-2. We had a lot of fun and decided that the Journal was worth doing. Jack wrote a letter of introduction to the other astronauts... and the rest is history.

Above: Eric Jones with flight director Gerry Griffin (left) and astronaut Charlie Duke in Canberra, May 2018.

posted 07-11-2025 12:12 PM            

He actually managed, apparently with the help of Jack Schmitt, to carry out interviews (and extended Q&As) with moonwalkers Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, Mitchell, Scott, Irwin, Duke, Cernan and Schmitt. They not only answered his questions but raised multiple issues for discussion that I for the most part have never seen discussed elsewhere. The result is of massive historical value to humanity, and, speaking as an author, an absolutely indispensable tool for researchers writing about Project Apollo.