Sure, traipsing about the lunar surface is all fun and games when you’ve got a gold club and a flag for planting. But if you’re there to work, those puffy, sausage-fingered space suits are more hindrance than help.
Just look at Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke as he valiantly muscles Lunar Sample 61016 from the ground at Plum Crater in 1972. The rock — dubbed “Big Muley” after NASA field geology team leader Bill Muehlberger — weighed 12kg and was comprised of shocked anorthosite melded into a fragment of troctolitic, most likely generated during the impact 1.8 million years ago that formed the South Ray Crater, where Apollo 16 landed. The sample is now housed in the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. [It’s OK to Be Smart – Wikipedia]