Page 24 - The Secret Museum

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 …).