File:The Apollo 16 Moon Rock Manifest (1972).jpg

Fifty years ago, at 7:23pm PST, Apollo 16 touched down on the moon. To celebrate this occasion, I will share one of my treasured artifacts from the mission — the moon rock manifest used by Duke and Young to tally the weight of the samples gathered over three days on the lunar surface and three Rover rides around town (EVA 1-3). The page is smudged with lunar dust from their gloves as they weighed each precious rock and bags of regolith dust on a pound-scale adjusted for 1/6 gravity.

They had a target total weight budget, which they exceeded, and they had to get permission from mission control to retain the Apollo-record-setting-haul of 213 lbs. They also had a load balancing challenge of where to place each sample collection bag across four locations, with weight limits on each. so as to not shift the center of gravity of the lunar module ascent stage for launch (see the COLLECTION BAG STOWAGE exercise at the center of the page; each number there is the bag number, with the weight of each bag noted above; it all adds up within the limits, barely). Essential arithmetic for the mission!

The reverse side of the checklist, below, entitled “CABIN PREP.-EVA 1,” was used to prepare for the first Moon walk. LM Pilot Duke made sure that everything needed to sustain life was checked off before stepping out of the Lunar Module to explore the Moon, including Buddy Secondary Life Support Systems (BSLSS), cameras, film, rock collection bags, sun compass, maps, and checklists, as well as the very first roll of duct tape brought to the lunar surface! I’ll add details on that in the comments below.

There are 16 checkmarks and other notations written by Moonwalker Duke while on the Moon’s surface. The dark stains on both sides of the checklist are particles of lunar dust.

I started my space collecting with a focus on Apollo 16, and this rock manifest is quite rare (only Apollo 16 and 17 are in private collections). In the comments below, I’ll include the NASA transcript from the Lunar Module to Mission Control as they processed each of the three moon rock hauls. I was trying to find video of the unloading process but have not found it for Apollo 16 yet.

Each rock has detailed analysis. For example, here is the writeup on the first 14-lb rock, and an overview of the Apollo 16 collection.

An image of this page is also on the NASA server. And the opinion of The opinion of SpaceRelics: “During the past seven years, I have been privileged to catalog and appraise tens of thousands of flown and unflown American space artifacts from virtually every mission. However, in all that time, this particular artifact has stood out in my mind as potentially one of the most significant. This item represents one of the most important original source documents of the space program, and indeed the entire pantheon of human exploration.”