My Moon Rocks Story

I used to work in Building 37 which is almost next door to this moon rock facility at the NASA Johnson Space Center. Today Building 37 is used for biomedical research, but it was the original quarantine building for the returning Apollo astronauts, the moon rocks, and their return capsules. Just in case there were moon bugs, nobody knew then and they were playing it safe. The astronauts actually stayed in a modified Airstream trailer just outside the building while the return capsule and moon rocks were processed indoors inside a giant vacuum chamber. I think the chamber had about a 30 foot ceiling, was maybe 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, more or less, to give an idea of the scale, those are by no means exact numbers. The vacuum held any potential contaminants inside and helped to prevent any contamination of the returned samples. There was quite extensive processing done there, most of which is probably lost to history; for example the return capsule was filthy with moon dust and I don't know what they did with that, but it's probably being curated as shown in this video with the rest of the moon rocks. Which is where everything got moved after processing in Building 37. After Apollo ended and Building 37 was repurposed, the vacuum chamber was converted into lab space for the Cardiovascular Laboratory of NASA's Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is where I did my postdoc work on cardiovascular countermeasures to the headward fluid shifts astronauts experience in microgravity, and why I know a little bit about this step in the processing of the moon rocks before they got to where they are today.

One day I got to take a tour of the moon rock facility shown in this video, bunny suit and all, with a small group of maybe a dozen people. We didn't get quite the VIP treatment these guys did with getting their hands into the box gloves, but it was close. We were briefed very professionally about the history and purposes of the facility, and were shown around the area of the glove boxes and cutting enclosure. We did not go into the Vault though, it was closed tight. When our guide ended her talk we were invited to look around on our own, and I chose to examine the interiors of some of the glove boxes very closely. I was astounded to see in one of them, a hair. Just a short piece maybe 2 or 3 inches long. To be fair it might have come from a cleaning brush or some kind of other tool like that deliberately introduced into the box, although it was not straight but somewhat curly so I don't think so. When I pointed out the hair to our guide she became quite embarrassed and flustered about it, and turned our attention elsewhere. I think she might have headed the place at the time (1990), but I'm not sure about that. It was one of the more amusing experiences during my time there :-)