A chance to reach for the moon
As my fingers brushed up against a piece of the moon, I couldn’t help but feel a little crass.
Here it was, this 3.8-billionyear-old rock; it orbited Earth at the dawn of life, it stood untouched as empires rose and fell, it outlasted beloved TV series like Flipper, The Monkees and Batman.
I, on the other hand, nearly flunked 10th grade math and once stepped on a rake to see if it would hit me in the face like in the cartoons (it did).
And so, as I crudely groped at the moon rock, I couldn’t help but notice it looked and felt like a lead tooth filling. I tongued at one of my molars and pretended there was a piece of space where my rotting tooth used to be.
In that moment, I thought about asking the curator if I could taste the rock — but ultimately decided against it.
This 24-gram piece of the moon will be on display at the Montreal Science Centre for the next five months. The centre is one of only 10 museums in the world to feature a lunar rock that visitors can also touch.
“It’s thrilling, it’s hard to explain just how rare of an opportunity this is,” said programming director Cybèle Robichaud. “We didn’t expect (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to loan us something this precious. We’re super excited.”
Sarah Arsenault, a project leader at the centre, travelled to NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas this summer to retrieve the lunar rock. She imagined they’d handcuff her wrist to a steel briefcase like in the movies.
When Robichaud told me this, I wondered what the black market is for rare space artifacts and whether it would be worth it, financially, to pull off a moon rock heist.
It turns out they didn’t give Arsenault a security detail or a steel attaché briefcase. Instead, they put the rock in a lunch pail and sent her on her way.
“She wasn’t allowed to let it out of her sight,” Robichaud said.
When Arsenault landed in Montreal at 2 a.m. that morning, her instructions were to head straight to the Science Centre.
This particular piece of rock — it is a dark, volcanic basalt formed from the rapid cooling of lunar lava — was collected during NASA’s final moon landing, Apollo 17. When you look at the moon and see the charcoal semi circles that slither across the bright surface — those are basalt deposits.
Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Eugene Cernan collected it in 1972, flew it 384,000 kilometres back to Earth and now it sits on the second floor of the science centre.
The exhibit also highlights a Quebec-connection to NASA’s moon landing missions. The Longueuil-based Héroux-Devtek
designed the landing gears for each of the Apollo modules.
A replica of the gear is on display just behind the rock. When I asked if that very piece was the one used during Apollo 17, Robichaud gave me a stunned look.
“Those are still on the moon,” she said, smiling politely at my ignorant question. “They were landing gears, they didn’t need them to take off.”
I realized, at that moment, why my 10th grade science teacher insisted I sit at the front of the class.
Our fascination with the moon is as old as humanity itself. The earliest societies used it to measure the rhythms of the seasons and to light the way during a hunt or a harvest.
The Greeks, Mesopotamians, Celts and eastern civilizations all practised some form of moon worship.
This lunar fascination has taken on a new form these days: for $174.16, you can buy 10 acres from moonestates.com. In the event of any sort of land dispute between prospective moon colonists, the website offers “VIP package members” a gold-trimmed deed proving ownership.
During the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, U.S. politician Newt Gingrich suggested a nine-year project to colonize the moon. Given that the modernday cost of simply landing astronauts on the moon is estimated at $104 billion, colonizing space seems somewhat far-fetched.
On the opposite end of the lunar obsession, there are still conspiracy theorists who insist the moon landings were faked. One notion is that the Americans filmed the landings in a Hollywood studio to earn a propaganda victory in the Cold War against Soviet Russia.
In that theory, filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was blackmailed into filming the hoax missions given his experience directing 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Of course, for that to be true it would require a conspiracy involving hundreds and possibly thousands of scientists, camera operators, set designers, astronauts and government officials.
And if it’s true, then what the hell was I awkwardly rubbing my fingers against inside the science centre?