Page 22 - The Secret Museum

I ALMOST FORGOT TO LOOK at the moon today.

Those are the words on the first painting I ever chose for myself. I saw it in a little

arty café in Cochin, Kerala, India. At the other end of the subcontinent, in Nepal,
people think the dead live on the moon. Visiting Apollo astronauts have been asked,
‘When you were on the moon, did you happen to see my auntie?’

Since my trip to the storage facility of the National Air and Space Museum, when I
look at the moon I see hundreds of spacesuits, lying quietly in the cold, and two
knees, thickly coated in moon dust.

When I visited the museum, the spacesuit storage facility was located, rather
appropriately, in Suitland, Maryland. To get there, I took a Metro from central
Washington DC and then walked along a highway, melting in the summer heatwave
and being hooted at by people who were probably wondering what on earth I was

doing there. Eventually, I arrived and was greeted by the museum collection
conservator, Lisa Young, and curator, Cathleen Lewis. They opened a spacey, silver
door, walked us into a middle room, like an airlock, and then into a room filled with
spacesuits in stasis.

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.