USS Hornet (CV-12) 27 March 1967. She reached Japan exactly a month later and departed the Sasebo base on 19 May for the war zone. She operated in Vietnamese waters throughout the first half of 1967. "Hornet" recovered the astronauts from the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11, on 24 July 1969. President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, where they lived in quarantine aboard "Hornet" prior to transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. The first steps on Earth of returning moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, are marked
Moon rock the three astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission: Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. Because of their rarity on Earth, and the difficulty of obtaining more, Moon rocks have been frequent targets of theft and vandalism, and many have gone missing or were stolen. Moon rock Moon rock or lunar rock is rock that is found on the Earth's moon including lunar material collected during the course of human exploration of the Moon, or rock that has been ejected naturally from the Moon's surface (and which has then landed on the Earth as meteorites). Moon rocks on Earth come from three sources: