Five phone calls later and someone was found with a key to JAXA.

The first door had no keyhole.

The second did, the key turned, but the door didn't open.

"We'll have to go a secret way," I was told. And handed a flashlight.

A set of stone steps—that I swear I'd never seen before in my life—led to mercifully ajar door. The room inside was full of generators being examined by hard hats.

We passed through another door into complete darkness.

Our flashlights illuminated the bottom of the stairwell.

"No elevators today."

My office is on floor five.

We started in the basement.

I discovered that I am very unfit.

Also, that the bottom three floors of my building have no windows in the stairwell.

And that I needed the bathroom, but that was also not happening.

I shrugged on my mission jacket, slid the asteroid grain into my carry-on, and picked up a case containing a model spacecraft.

Finally, I attached my official institute pin.

I would need this for phase 2: convincing the airline that I was carrying a uncontaminated fragment of the early Solar System.

This box contains a model of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Although frankly, it looks like a case for body parts. Nobody ever touches it 😐

Too fragile for the overhead bins, we have to purchase an oversized luggage seat. This requires a lot of measuring (not all seats are wide enough, so it’s not a given the airline will allow this) with everything repeated in a nail-biting fashion at check-in. It did also mean that I had pre-boarding with my spacecraft child!