Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility holds 382 kilograms of the Moon. That is the total weight of rock, dust, core samples, and pebbles that six Apollo missions hauled back to Earth between 1969 and 1972. Most of it sits in a two-story building on the grounds of NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, inside stainless steel cabinets flushed continuously with high-purity nitrogen. The people who work with these samples wear cleanroom suits and reach through multi-layered gloves just to touch them. What does it take to keep a piece of another world uncontaminated for decades? And why did it take NASA until 1979 to build the right place to do it?

• 2. A Plan Born in 1964

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  NASA engineers began thinking about where to put Moon rocks before anyone had reached the Moon. In 1964, a proposal sketched out a tiny 10-square-meter sample receiving laboratory, equipped with remote-controlled manipulators working inside a sterile, high-vacuum chamber. The concept expanded quickly to include a clean room with analytical instruments capable of running preliminary tests on whatever the astronauts brought back.

  A committee of the Space Science Board took up the question and ran into two distinct anxieties pulling in opposite directions. Space biologists and the United States Public Health Service worried about what they called "back contamination" - the possibility that returning spacecraft could carry extraterrestrial microorganisms to Earth. Many of the astronauts and scientists close to the program were skeptical that any organisms could survive lunar conditions, but the concern was real enough to shape policy. The other anxiety ran the opposite direction: if the proposed facility were given too much analytical power, outside researchers might simply be cut off from the samples.

  In 1965 the committee resolved both tensions with a single recommendation - a laboratory with deliberately limited analytical capacity, paired with the ability to quarantine both the returning astronauts and the samples they carried home.

• 3. The Lunar Receiving Laboratory

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  Building 37 at the Johnson Space Center became home to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, completed in 1967 at a cost of $7.8 million. At 8,000 square meters, it was built to handle three tasks: process the samples, distribute them to researchers, and keep astronauts in quarantine after their return. The quarantine requirement for astronauts was eventually dropped starting with Apollo 15, as the concern about lunar microorganisms faded.

  The LRL handled Apollo samples adequately as they arrived, but it was structurally unfit for accumulation. It could process the samples from a current mission but had no good way to store or work with material from previous flights. NASA responded by dropping the requirement, after Apollo 12, that samples be handled inside a vacuum atmosphere. A simpler nitrogen environment took its place, making the labs easier to work in. An extra vault went up, and then an entirely new building - the Sample Storage and Processing Laboratory, housed in Building 31 of the Johnson Space Center. After the final Apollo mission, every lunar sample was transferred out of the LRL and into Building 31.

  Even Building 31 left a nagging problem unsolved: every single Moon rock was in one place, in one city, on a stretch of the Gulf Coast that hurricanes hit regularly.

• 4. A Secret Bus and a Bunker

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  Fourteen percent of the entire lunar sample collection was quietly moved to San Antonio in 1976. The destination was an empty ammunition bunker at Brooks Air Force Base, chosen as a second-site backup against the hurricanes and, more grimly, the military threats that planners worried could one day target a single high-value location.

  The transport itself was deliberately low-profile. Samples were loaded onto a specially modified passenger bus and driven at night, with a police escort, without public announcement. The bunker at Brooks held that smaller collection for more than two decades. In 2002, when the base was converted out of military control under the Base Realignment and Closure process, the samples had to move again. They went to the White Sands Test Facility, where a new, purpose-built storage space was fitted inside an existing secure building. Those samples remain there today - 52 kilograms of the Apollo total, held at White Sands as a permanent offsite reserve.

  With a portion of the collection secured away from Houston, construction could begin on a facility designed from the ground up to protect what stayed behind.

• 5. Building 31N

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  Construction on the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility started in 1977 in a new annex of Building 31, designated Building 31N. The budget was $2.5 million. Two years later, on the 20th of July 1979 - the tenth anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon - the building was formally dedicated.

  The structure runs two stories and covers 1,300 square meters. Inside are storage vaults, sample preparation laboratories, a dedicated vault for data and records associated with each specimen, and machinery that continuously supplies nitrogen to the cabinets where researchers work. Every material used in the construction - floor coverings, wall surfaces, plumbing, light fixtures, even paint - was screened in advance to eliminate chemical elements that could contaminate the lunar samples. Air throughout the facility is filtered to remove all suspended particles. The laboratories and vaults are held at slightly above atmospheric pressure, so unfiltered outside air cannot drift in. Particulate levels are monitored on a regular schedule.

  The storage vaults sit at an elevation calculated to keep them above anticipated storm-surge sea levels. During a hurricane threat, a water-tight door is bolted directly into the frame of the pristine sample vault.

• 6. Touching the Moon Indirectly

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  Researchers at the facility rarely touch a lunar sample with their hands. Work is done through stainless steel cabinets fitted with multi-layered gloves. The nitrogen inside those cabinets is continuously monitored for any trace of oxygen or moisture. If a sample must be exposed to conditions that could introduce contamination - say, for a particular experiment - that sample is permanently separated from the pristine collection once it returns.

  Cross-contamination between missions is also treated as a real risk. Samples from different Apollo missions are never processed in the same cabinet at the same time. Each cabinet is dedicated to one mission's material. When extensive use leaves a cabinet dusty, or when it needs to be reassigned to a different mission's samples, it is cleaned with ultra-pure water before anything else enters it.

  People entering the laboratories and vaults change into cleanroom suits. Approximately 100 visitors come to the facility each year for research or educational purposes. Several hundred more receive samples sent to them remotely. Researchers submit formal proposals, which go through independent peer review. Between 40 and 50 proposals are approved annually, and around 400 lunar samples are shipped out each year. Most weigh less than one gram.

• 7. What the Vaults Hold

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  Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 together returned 382 kilograms of material: rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand, and surface dust representing 2,200 individual specimens. Seventy-five percent of that total lives at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility, with most of it in pristine condition. Scientific processing has divided portions of the collection into fragments, producing more than 110,000 individually cataloged samples from the original haul.

  Two specimens stand out among what the vaults hold. The Genesis Rock is notable because analysis determined it to be nearly as old as the Moon itself. Big Muley holds the distinction of being the single largest sample returned from the lunar surface by any Apollo mission.

  The Johnson Space Center's collection extends beyond the Moon. ANSMET expeditions to Antarctica, funded by the National Science Foundation, have brought back meteorites now stored there. NASA aircraft have gathered cosmic dust. The Genesis spacecraft collected solar wind atoms. The Stardust spacecraft returned both comet particles and interstellar dust particles. Alongside all of this, 300 grams of lunar material returned by three Soviet automated spacecraft - Luna 16, Luna 20, and Luna 24 - represents the other nation that brought Moon rocks home.

  Small samples have also traveled outward: to foreign heads of state, to every U.S. state, to museums, and to institutions around the world. NASA distributes educational packs consisting of six small rock and soil samples set in a lucite disc, paired with thin petrological sections for classroom use. The facility was built with room to receive far more than it currently holds, anticipating the lunar samples that future missions will eventually bring back.