#space suit

How hard is it to pick up rocks on the Moon? Once you've done the hard part of getting there safely, the rest must be easy. After all, it's barely 1/6 Earth gravity, which is why the heaviest individual rock we managed to grab was 26 pounds (on Earth).

It turns out that the spacesuit is the catch. The A7L suit used on the Apollo landings is closer to a futuristic power armor than you might think. When you're in vacuum, the atmosphere inside the suit will cause it to inflate and stiffen. The result is that every movement you make gets pushback from the suit. It naturally wants to inflate to a neutral position whereas you want to actually do things!

It's five layers with varying purposes such as cooling, fireproofing, anti-abrasion, thermal protection, and more. And the joints are a mess since they need to support complex movement with cables and wiring going through them too.

So would you be surprised to find out that even sitting down was a chore? The trick to the suits was a system of pulleys built into it. These gave the astronauts the leverage needed to overcome the suit's stiffness.

Even sitting down was a chore. To plop into the glorified lawn chair of the rover, an astronaut needed to pull a cable between their legs to force the suit into a sitting position.

Training for Apollo was done well before pools were used for practicing movement in space, but that wouldn't help with knowing about the suit stiffness. Instead, we learned about it during Gemini, when the first American spacewalks encountered serious difficulty doing things that would be easy on Earth.

And so picking up rocks became some of the most backbreaking work ever done in space. Later landings had astronauts working for over seven hours straight in these conditions.

NASA had to simplify things. Since you couldn't bend over, custom lightweight hand tools were developed. The astronauts brought with them an array of tongs, scoops, rakes, hammers, and a massive electric drill which could take core samples 3 meters down. With the lunar regolith 4-15 meters thick, we still haven't gotten to see what's below.

And these tools were used to death! The first excursion of a landing started with a "contingency" procedure where the closest rocks to the lander were snagged, just in case an emergency occurred and they had to leave immediately.

From there, they had a to-do list of geological priorities. Any samples they collected had to be put on the other astronaut, since they couldn't reach their own backpack-mounted sample bags.

Even getting the rocks back in the lander was a pain. NASA devised a conveyor belt to winch the boxes up into the lander, but astronauts found it was faster to just climb the ladder with them because the belt brought more dust inside than samples.