I’m not allowed to touch the moon rocks.
In the room where NASA stores the samples that Apollo astronauts brought to Earth decades ago, I peer at rocks and trays of dirt through glass. But my tour guides are firm: Nobody touches the moon rocks.
This is the pristine sample lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Being here is a big deal for me. I’ve spent years looking at cosmic rocks from a distance — my childhood involved lots of stargazing through a telescope, and in my college lab job, I processed pictures of Mars. I’ve been itching to scoop up a handful of alien sand and let it run through my fingers. Today, the opportunity feels as close as it is unlikely.
Before entering this clean room, I remove all my jewelry, including my wedding ring. My guides and I cover our shoes with blue paper booties and step into full-body jumpsuits with zippers from navel to neck and snaps at the ankles, wrists and throat. Once in the white bunny suits, we put on neoprene gloves, a hair cover, plus a pair of knee-high boots pulled over the blue booties. Finally, we spend a full minute standing in a phone booth–sized air shower, under a steady breeze blowing from ceiling to floor to clear us of any lingering dust.
Inside the clean room, I face another barrier: The rocks are stored in secure, pressurized cabinets — like big terrariums — filled with pure nitrogen. The only way to reach the samples is by sticking already-gloved hands into another set of gloves that wave from the cabinets like zombie arms.
Only five people in the world get to routinely handle these precious pebbles, sample processor Charis Krysher tells me. She’s one of them. But even Krysher and the lucky few can’t touch the samples directly. To pick up an Apollo rock, Krysher must either use stainless steel tweezers or slide her fingers into a third set of gloves made of Teflon.
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