A piece of the Moon was packed up and brought to Earth in 1972 by two NASA astronauts, and had been sitting in the White House Oval Office for the past four years as a symbol of America’s lunar ambitions. After Donald Trump took office, however, the Moon rock was replaced by an urn, presumably as the new administration sets its sight on Mars.
Recent images of the Oval Office revealed that the Apollo Moon rock had been removed from its display on a shelf to the left of Trump’s desk as part of the president’s redesign of the White House, collectSpace first reported. Trump vowed to plant the American flag on Mars during his inaugural speech on January 20, overlooking NASA’s ongoing efforts to land astronauts on the Moon by 2027.
NASA had loaned the Moon rock to the Biden administration in 2021 in recognition of past efforts to explore the lunar surface and the agency’s current Moon-to-Mars game plan. Apollo 17 astronauts—the last humans to walk on the lunar surface—collected the sample. The 332 gram (less than a pound) chunk of the Moon was chipped from a large boulder, and had likely formed 3.9 billion years ago during the last large impact that struck the nearside of the Moon, according to NASA.
After its four-year stint at the White House, the Moon rock display was returned to NASA, a spokesperson for the agency told collectSpace in an email. Before it made its way to Washington, the lunar sample had been sitting at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
It’s not clear whether the removal of the Moon rock has something to do with the current administration’s spaceflight plans. The Oval Office gets a redesign each time a new president assumes position. Trump also brought back a bust of Winston Churchill and flags of the military services, items that had been removed by former President Joe Biden, according to the Wall Street Journal.
We reached out to the White House and the White House Historical Association for more details but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Since Trump assumed office, NASA has been having difficulty navigating through the different executive orders issued by the new president. During his inaugural speech, Trump didn’t mention the Moon, while highlighting “launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” he said.
NASA has persistently vowed for a Moon-to-Mars approach, using the lunar surface as a testbed for landing astronauts on the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s. Rocket billionaire and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, on the other hand, has advocated for a more aggressive approach that targets a Mars touchdown right off the bat. Musk is a close advisor to Trump, and the new president may also be leaning more toward the commercial industry’s approach to space exploration, which is evident through his choice of private astronaut Jared Isaacman for the position of NASA administrator.
Trump’s new decor of the Oval Office could reflect the president’s Mars-bias, chucking the lunar rock out of the White House. The rocky sample has already traveled thousands of miles from the Moon to Earth, so a trip back to Houston isn’t a big deal, but a return to the lunar surface is the real point of debate.
