Moonrock in Vancouver
There are only five places in the world where a member of public can touch a piece of the moon recovered from one of the Apollo missions, not just from lunar meteorites. There’s one in the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in DC, Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and the MacMillan Space Center in Vancouver.
I’ve had the fortune to visit three of these places in the summer of 2016. Strangely enough, all three of those rocks were isosceles triangles and roughly the same size, maybe they all came from the same rock? I had expected a special texture from a moon rock, but reality was that so many visitors had touched it has smoothed out from years of human contact. It was cold, all rocks are. During the course of research for this article, I was surprised to learn that all but one of those rocks were in the US and none of them were outside North America. The US has sent out 135 moon rocks to different heads of states and 50 rocks to all 50 US states after the Apollo program so I was surprised that more weren’t on display for public enjoyment.
