He glanced at his watch. You’ve got six minutes.
He drove up a divided straightaway inside the Manned Spacecraft Center for the second time, craning his neck to find the right building number. He finally spotted a large number 37 in shadow under an overhang. Then he realized he’d missed the parking lot, and had to circle the block to find the entrance. He quickly squeezed the Satellite into a spot between two aging VW Beetles—scientists prefer Volkswagens?—grabbed his bag and jogged to the entrance.
He saw people going into a conference room just off the main foyer and glanced at the government-issue wall clock, black hands on a round white face. NASA was big on keeping accurate time. With two minutes to spare, he followed them in and headed for the front of the room, setting his bag on the long veneer table around which the scientists had gathered. He took his notebook out of his back pocket, quickly reviewing the things he was hoping to find out, then raised a hand to get everyone’s attention. The room quieted.
“Good morning, everyone. My name’s Kaz Zemeckis.” He omitted mentioning his military rank, knowing it sometimes rubbed scientists the wrong way. “I’m a former MOL astronaut, recently assigned as crew-government liaison for Apollo 18. I appreciate you all meeting with me.”
He glanced around the room, making eye contact. More facial hair than normal. And more women. He spotted Chad Miller and nodded; part of the backup commander’s job was to go to briefings Tom Hoffman didn’t have time for.
“There are lots of details still to come, many of which are classified, but I wanted to start the Apollo 18 revised science discussion with you. I need to get smarter about moonrocks, and I hear this is the right place for that.”
There were polite chuckles and nods around the table. The Lunar Receiving Laboratory had been purpose-built to quarantine returning astronauts in case they brought back an interplanetary plague from the Moon. When the first three Apollo crews all stayed healthy—it turned out that, as suspected, the Moon had no life, not even single-celled bacteria—the quarantine period was canceled. But Building 37 was also designed to house the moonrocks and dirt—don’t say dirt, they call it regolith, Kaz corrected himself. Somewhere inside this building were racks full of bits of the Moon, 842 pounds in total, protected like the Crown Jewels. Actually, pound for pound, the moonrocks had cost more.
Kaz summarized the updated timeline of Apollo 18 for the group, and described the revised landing location, without specifying why it had changed. The lack of surprise on their faces told him that word had already gotten around. MSC was a small community, and the lunar scientists an even tighter subculture within it. They all knew that shifting political agendas were part of the deal.
“So,” Kaz said, “what have we learned recently, from orbital photos, the Apollo returns here in this building or the Soviet robotic return samples, that would make you want to go have a close look at a place on the Moon where we’ve never set foot?”
The room contemplated the question. The Russians had successfully brought back small samples of lunar regolith on their unmanned Luna 16 and Luna 20 missions. Less than a pound in total, but they’d drilled over a foot deep to get it. Despite some published academic papers, no one knew for sure what the Soviets had found.
A tall woman with unruly long black hair raised her hand. “Astronaut Zemeckis, if I may?”
“Kaz, please.”
She smiled slightly. “I’m Dr. Laura Woodsworth, one of the cosmochemists here in the lab.”
Kaz nodded. She was slender and tanned, wearing a sleeveless floral print dress, with a small crucifix on a gold chain around her neck.
“We’ve learned more about the Moon in the past forty months than in the previous forty thousand years. Radiometric dating of the samples the missions brought back has shown us that the Moon is over four billion years old—quite close to the age of the Earth. Also, the Moon’s regolith is not like Earth dust, which has been weathered by rain and wind. Instead, it’s more like broken bits of glass, the result of billions of years of meteorite impact fragments.”
Chad spoke up. “It’s nasty stuff, Kaz, like loose sandpaper grit. Hard on machinery and spacesuits. The guys have dust stuck to their suits when they come back into the LM that makes them cough after they take their helmets off.”
Kaz glanced down the table at him, wondering why Chad felt he needed to interject, but Laura nodded. “By looking at the chemistry of the rocks and dust, we’re getting an idea that the interior of the Moon is more like Earth than we thought. A central heavy core, solidified magma surrounding that, and a crust on top. The crust is the gray color you see when you look up at the Moon.”