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Good Question
If you like handling tiny glass shards, sure, go ahead and touch the lunar surface. But avoid the rocks.
By Randall Munroe
Twelve people have walked on the moon since humans landed there 50 years ago, but no one has ever directly touched its surface.
Those astronauts wore spacesuits outside the lander. No one ever took off a glove or a boot while standing on the moon.
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“Once we got inside and took off our suits and gloves, we did have some lunar dust on the floor, and rocks that were not bagged,” Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who walked on the moon in 1972, called to tell me. “On the way home, I collected the rocks floating around the spacecraft. One would come floating by, and I just picked it up and put it in my garment pocket. When I got back, I stuck them in a little jar that was about the size of a prescription bottle, and then I turned them back in to NASA.”
Touching lunar rocks inside a spacecraft, or in a museum, is one thing; removing a glove and exposing yourself to the vacuum of space is another. In science fiction, terrible things befall such astronauts: their blood boils away, their insides get sucked out.
But removing a glove wouldn’t necessarily be instantly fatal. For the most part, human skin is tough enough to handle brief exposure to a vacuum. If you had a custom spacesuit with a seal around your forearm, you could probably remove your glove during a moonwalk without suffering permanent damage.
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