It’s a cold (18°C/65°F), narrow room lined with hundreds of headless bodies on metal bunk beds. Each body is covered with a sheet, as if it were a morgue for spacesuits (only these suits are not ‘dead’, they’re being preserved for future generations). In total, there are 287 suits in the collection, but only a little more than half of these are in storage at any time. The others are on display or on loan to other museums around the world. Each one is referred to by the name of the astronaut who wore it, and each is displayed on a mannequin and laid out flat on its back on the metal bunk beds, five to six bunks high. We pulled back a sheet and uncovered a body.
It was the spacesuit of Harrison H. ‘Jack’ Schmitt of Apollo 17, the only scientist to walk on the moon. His spacesuit is covered in grey dust, especially the knees. It looks like ash, but it is moon dust. The moon dust is the reason why this suit is not on display. Schmitt is a geologist. When the Apollo astronauts were in training, they went partying together. Schmitt would sit there among the pilots, talking about rocks. He was chosen for Apollo 17, the final manned mission to the moon, because scientists at NASA were going bananas. They couldn’t believe that, of the 12 men who had walked on the moon, not one was a scientist.
There had been some lighthearted scientific experiments – playing golf, dropping a feather and hammer at the same time to see which would fall first (they fell at the same time), and some lunar samples had been brought back to Earth, but no one who could make snap scientific decisions on the moon had ever been up there. As a geologist, Schmitt could do, in another world, what he did all the time on the Earth – dig to find out more about what the planet was made of. The scientists at NASA insisted that Schmitt was given a seat.
Hours into the return trip, the crew of Apollo 17 took one of the most famous photographs of all time, a photograph of our planet called ‘The Blue Marble’, of the whole Earth lit up by the sun. Africa was in daylight, and Antarctica was lit by the December solstice. Although NASA credits the whole crew with taking the photograph, as they were all using the camera, passing it between them, it’s acknowledged now that the iconic image was the work of Schmitt.
Much later, he and Gene Cernan left Ronald Evans behind in the command module and landed the lunar module in the Taurus-Littrow valley of the moon. It was December 1972. They stayed on the moon for three days, driving 16 kilometres across the light side. They saw lunar plains, took measurements of the gravitational field of the moon, passed steep mountains, drove around small craters and stood beside enormous boulders and glittering rocks.
Whenever they saw interesting things they jumped out to gather treasures to take home. They were ecstatic, especially Schmitt. He began singing, ‘I was strolling on the moon one day,’ skipping, bouncing and humming happily on his way. Gene Cernan, not a geologist, sung along too.
In total, they brought back 109 kilograms of rock. One of these samples is named Troctolite 76535. It formed when the moon was only 300 million years old and it has a faint magnetic field, suggesting that the moon itself may once have had one. Troctolite rock is found on Earth in several places, including Cornwall, the Isle of Rum in Scotland and western Australia. Schmitt also collected orange soil, which suggested the possibility of water, and maybe even life, at some point in the moon’s history.
In his travels across the moon, a quarter of a million miles from Earth, Schmitt fell over or made contact with the moon more often than any other Apollo astronaut. His suit got very dirty as he crawled along collecting rocks, or from when he fell over and pushed himself upright again. Most of the Apollo spacesuits were dry-cleaned when they arrived back to Earth, but Schmitt’s never was. NASA wanted to preserve the final Apollo mission spacesuits just as they were. So dust from the lunar surface remains embedded in the fibre. I peered at the knees of his spacesuit. They were thick with grey lunar soil. I really got to look at the moon that day.
Apollo 17 was the flight when the astronauts were on the surface of the moon for the longest period of time, travelled furthest across it and collected the most lunar samples. This suit is just as it was when Schmitt, one of the last two men on the moon, left its surface, splashed back into the Pacific Ocean, took the spacesuit off and put his Earth clothes back on. It’s too precious to be displayed in the museum.
The people who have seen this spacesuit are the collections staff of the museum, scientists, researchers and the Apollo astronauts who come to see their suits, often with their grandchildren (Alan Bean, Apollo 12, is the astronaut who visits his suit most often), and NASA engineers. NASA’s design team is working on suits for Mars. The Mars suits will need to last longer and be able to be taken on and off more than the Apollo suits, but they’re a good place to start. Schmitt’s suit is especially useful in aiding with their design, as he tested it to the max, bounding about with rocks in his hand. They’ve looked inside using x-radiography and studied in detail the lunar soil that clings to it.
After marvelling at Schmitt’s suit, I looked around the room. On the bunk adjacent to it I saw a boot sticking out from beneath its sheet. It had a circular patch of Velcro on the sole. ‘What’s that?’ I asked the curators, pointing at the boot. ‘Oh, that’s Neil Armstrong,’ they said. This Velcro-soled boot was covered with an additional lunar boot when it stepped on to the moon but, still, it had covered the foot of Neil Armstrong when he took his ‘one giant step for mankind’.
Only Schmitt and Cernan’s lunar boots are back on Earth: they’re here in the museum collection as two of the most complete flown suits that made it back. The boots Neil wore inside the spaceship had Velcro on the soles so that he could stand still. The interior of the ship had Velcro laid down like a carpet so that, whenever the astronauts needed to be rooted in one place, they could stick themselves on to the ship. Presumably, they walked around making loud, ripping noises.
Neil Armstrong’s suit and under boots have been in storage for five years, having conservation work done on them. They won’t always be behind the scenes and the same goes for a lot of the suits. They’re here resting, between exhibitions, ‘in shavasana position’, as Lisa put it (that’s the yoga position where you lie on your back, meditating). It may be years before these suits are put on display, but it is possible to display them.
Schmitt’s will need to wait decades, at least, until it can come out of storage. Museums have not yet found a way to display it without damage to the suit and its precious moon dust.
Since I saw the suits, they have been on the move. They now live in their new storage facility, in Chantilly, Virginia. The new facility is part of the Air and Space museum’s sister museum, built near the airport, so that new air and space exhibits can be flown straight into the museum collection. The suits were moved in trucks, a few each day, snuggled into crates to keep them safe. The collections staff considered moving them in coffins but decided against it. In their new home, the suits are stored according to mission.
Now that I have seen the suits they wore, how fragile they are, considering they kept men alive on the moon, and now that I have seen lunar soil, on dusty knees 2 centimetres from my nose, the moon landings feel much more immediate. I wasn’t alive when mankind landed on the moon, so I missed the excitement that everyone who was must have felt listening to their radios, watching TV all over Earth and then gazing up at the white thing in the sky and imagining humans there in space. Now I know it wasn’t a hoax (unless of course the sheets we didn’t pull back actually covered Mickey Mouse suits …).
The moon landings also seem more surreal. The suits are made out of fibreglass fabric, a material that was first manufactured for household items. Cathy remembers that her ’parents had fibreglass curtains, the height of fashion in the sixties’. The suits seem far less robust than I had imagined. They have holes where the breathing apparatus was screwed on. They look so normal that they seem strange. They’re very low-tech, very human.
Seeing the suits has made me feel that something greater than NASA and Nixon must have been at work to get those men up there, keep them safe and bring them home. I’ve read that there was only a ten per cent chance the astronauts would make it back alive. Now, when I look at the moon and think of those fragile suits lying in shavasana, it feels to me as if the moon wanted to meet