Planting a Flag [Back Story]

What's it like to plant your feet in moon dust? Earlier this year, Associate Editor Rachel Courtland got a chance to find out. Courtland traveled to Swamp Works, a laboratory at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, to research a story on the future of space exploration for this month‚s special issue. There she was allowed to step inside the facility‚s Big Box-a glass-walled room packed with 120 metric tons of powdered basaltic rock that stands in for lunar soil.