Mare basalt : Apollo 11 sample 10049 (top) and Apollo 15 sample 15556 (bottom). The Apollo 15 mare basalt is vesicular - it has holes which were once gas bubbles. Most mare basalts are not vesicular. The cube is for scale and is 1 inch on each side. (From NASA photos S76-25456 and S71-45240).

Any geoscientist (and there have been thousands from all over the world) who has studied lunar samples knows that anyone who thinks the Apollo lunar samples were created on Earth as part of government conspiracy doesn’t know much about rocks. The Apollo samples are just too good. They tell a self-consistent story with a complexly interwoven plot that’s better than any story any conspirator could have conceived. I’ve studied lunar rocks and soils for 30+ years and I couldn’t make even a poor imitation of a lunar breccia, lunar soil, or a mare basalt in the lab. And with all due respect to my clever colleagues in government labs, no one in “the Government” could do it either, even now that we know what lunar rocks are like. Lunar samples show evidence of formation in an extremely dry environment with essentially no free oxygen and little gravity. Some have impact craters on the surface and many display evidence for a suite of unanticipated and complicated effects associated with large and small meteorite impacts. Lunar rocks and soil contain gases (hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon) derived from the solar wind with isotope ratios different than Earth forms of the same gases. They contain crystal damage from cosmic rays. Lunar igneous rocks have crystallization ages, determined by techniques involving radioisotopes, that are older than any known Earth rocks. (Anyone who figures out how to fake that is worthy of a Nobel Prize.) It was easier and cheaper to go to the Moon and bring back some rocks then it would have been to create all these fascinating features on Earth.