How to Handle Moon Rocks and Lunar Bugs

: A Personal History of Apollo's Lunar Receiving Lab

Apollo 11 crew in quarantine talking with President Richard Nixon. Credit: NASA

50 lbs. of moon rocks. That's how much weight was allocated for the Apollo 11 astronauts to bring back lunar samples to Earth. But this would be the first time materials from another world would be brought to our planet. What should be done with these alien rocks, and could they possibly be a threat to life as we know it?

What started out as a seemingly straightforward idea of building a facility to store and study rocks from the Moon ended up becoming a power struggle between engineers building the facility and scientists who wanted to study the rocks and those who wanted to save the world from biological disaster — not to mention even more squabbling between the various governmental agencies and politicians. In the middle of it all was James McLane, Jr. one of the engineers tasked with the early planning for the Manned Spaceflight Center –now known as Johnson Space Center in Houston — and in particular, he led a group to determine the requirements and design concept of NASA's Lunar Receiving Laboratory.
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