I went on the tours about a year ago and found them very interesting. I think you do need a good guide and group, if you sat in the back and no one asked questions I can see how it would get boring. Completely agree that the Saturn V was incredible.
To me the most impressive part of the tour was the piece of moon rock that you could literally touch. That's a chunk of rock that an astronaut picked up from the moon, across 200,000 miles of vacuum.
Thousands of engineers came together to make that achievement happen, working at the bleeding edge of what was possible 50 years ago, and here I am slacking off on Hacker News on a Monday morning instead of figuring out why this unit I keep having to power cycle won't stay online.
Really!? At the exhibits I've been to the rocks have always been kept in sealed containers. Odd question, did you happen to get to.. smell the rock? The reason I ask is that the Apollo astronauts reported that the moon dust had an aroma similar to gunpowder. Left me curious what, if any, smell a rock would have. Ostensibly it'd just smell... like a rock. But on the Earth dust also smells... like dust, not gunpowder.
Oh wow. Before submitting this just found a really interesting article on this topic. [1] While moon dust does apparently smell like gunpowder, nobody knows why. And back on Earth, the rocks return to smelling... like rocks. Very odd.
That is my finger touching a piece of the moon. <shudders>.
It was just a small piece, epoxied to a polycarbonate display where it was protected from being peeled out by vandals. You can't get close enough to put your nose near it, but if you could, I suppose it would have smelled like people's fingers; it seemed to have been polished smooth by thousands of touches.
Also, I was successful in logging off HN all morning and making lives and products better by fixing the restart of this piece of industrial automation. Worn-out over-capacity SSD, apparently. Not quite a retrieval of a moon rock, but now the people putting together Mercedes A-class center consoles will be less frustrated by the heat stake machine that puts them together, and won't have to use the manual heat staker as often. Lunch is almost up - one more look at that picture, then it's back to focusing and working!
I got to go in the big moon rock vault at JSC once and see all[1] the moon rocks. I don't remember any particular smell. Of course unlike in a museum, the ones in there we couldn't touch with bare hands or anything -- we were in bunny suits with gloves and masks and so on. And I didn't try to sniff any! Interesting article, I see that someone else agrees they don't smell like anything in the vault. :)
[1] Not literally all: aside from the small samples out for display at museums etc., about 10-15% IIRC are kept at White Sands rather than at Johnson.
I've been to that exhibit and indeed, t is one of a few moonrock samples accessible to the public.
Being able to touch a moon rock was memorable but I never thought to smell it. My immediate inclination, to be honest, was to go off and wash my hands, considering tens of thousands of other index fingers have rubbed against it. It's probably as germy as a wal-mart shopping cart handle.
On the surface of the Moon, there is no oxygen and the rocks are bombarded by UV and other forms of radiation. That's got to lead to some interesting chemical reactions.
To me the most impressive part of the tour was the piece of moon rock that you could literally touch. That's a chunk of rock that an astronaut picked up from the moon, across 200,000 miles of vacuum.
Thousands of engineers came together to make that achievement happen, working at the bleeding edge of what was possible 50 years ago, and here I am slacking off on Hacker News on a Monday morning instead of figuring out why this unit I keep having to power cycle won't stay online.