If someone had a way to obtain a small but steady supply? Could you sell lunar rocks and dust for what it would cost to obtain them?
Sure considering you can find them here on earth.
Looks like they go for around $99 (looks like a deep discount from what they used to sell for) .
But if you buy one, how do you know it’s really from the moon?
Hmm. New business idea.
The link I provided they claim the rock is certified as a moon rock by some scientists. Of course could be a scam but not sure what else you can do.
I bought one of these a few years ago. One night, I heard a little rattling sound - I looked over at my night-stand, and the moon rock was vibrating and shaking. Slightly, but noticeably. Very alarmed, I jumped out of bed and turned on the light to get a better look at it. It started shaking even more, and at this point I was seriously freaked out. I didn’t know what to do - I didn’t want to touch it or pick it up, but I didn’t want to just leave it sitting there. So I just stood back a few feet and kept looking it it. Then all of a sudden it cracked in two, and this fucking…thing…crawled out of it. What it looked like was…almost like a squid or octopus, but with these disgusting hairs on it. It started making these hissing sounds, and what looked like spikes or something started protruding from its tentacles. I reached for the only weapon in the vicinity, a baseball bat that was lying in the corner, and smashed the creature or whatever the fuck it was until it was a bloody mess. Exhausted and relieved, I collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.
The next morning, it was all gone. No rock, no dead creature, nothing. There was this note on my end table, though, printed on some kind of high-quality paper that had a very fine texture to it. On the note, it was printed, “Look no further.” I had no idea what to make of this. I looked at the paper closer, examining it under the light, and was able to make out a very faint water-mark on the paper. It was the symbol of the Freemasons, inside a six-pointed Star of David.
You too!? :eek:
I had a similar thing happen too except, when I hit it with a baseball bat, I found out that it was really a Mexican jumping bean. I felt a little duped by the back-alley moonrock dealer and will probably never see that $10,000 again. Live and learn.
Lucky it wasn’t Meteor Shit…
As a Freemason, I’m compelled to ignore the previous few posts you might want to try a gavel instead of a baseball bat, you fools
I have no idea what it’d cost to get samples back from Luna, but the astronomical cost of genuine moon origin meteorites is a result of their scarcity. I suspect that unaltered samples would be worth far more than a 2mm x 2mm slice off a larger specimen. Natural shaped are running between $1000 and $5000 per gram, so base your business model on the low end but pick up some lunar basalt samples that are small enough to sell individually.
What kind of business model is that? Don’t you want to sell them for *more * than it cost to obtain them?
I smell a plot to destroy capitalism. Commie bastard.
A few qualifiers: I wasn’t referring to lunar meteorite samples, the very rare handful of rocks that landed on Earth after being blasted off the moon. I was referring to samples returned from the moon like the Apollo missions brought back. As for what it would cost, the only basis I have would be the Russian Luna sampler missions that brought back small (<100 grams) samples. That’s hard to calculate because (1.) The custom upper stages optimized for lunar missions don’t exist anymore, and what it would cost to have them produced I can’t begin to guess. (2) The Russian Proton booster’s capacity was unfortunately at the very knife edge of being able to do a lunar sample mission at all. A rocket 50% larger would probably be able to return 2-3X the sample weight (due to the minimum weight overhead of the probe). For discussion sake, let’s say that you can bring samples back from the moon for 100 million dollars a kilo. How many buyers would pay a million dollars for a 10-gram piece of lunar basalt?
No cite, but I seem to remember a law against a private US citizen owning a genuine moon rock. Now, that law probably only includes Apollo rocks, If Richard Bronson built a contraption to go get a bunch tomorrow, I don’t know how or why they’d stop me from buying one.
Lunar meteorite prices are the only thing I had to go on, sorry. As far as I know, no samples brought back are for sale. NASA gets rather cranky when any of the Apollo rocks are offered for sale and even knowing how limited the supply is, I’ve just discovered that they were going for $1000-$5000 (cite)
Might be able to get more away from the black market, but less because the supply is increasing with every trip.
Interesting or historic specimens would possibly fetch more, and if your ship exploded in a spectacular fashion the price might jump temporarily.
Maybe bringing back a rover and/or a few spent probes would fetch a higher price
I’m wary of that site. Sure, they claim the rocks are from “the moon”, but they don’t specify which moon. I’d hate to invest my money in a chunk of Luna, only to wind up with something from Ganymede instead. That would suck. I hate Ganymede.
A typical NASA Small Explorer mission costs about $100 million. That’s for designing, building and launching a small satellite (about the size and weight of a household refrigerator) into low earth orbit. I’m not sure you can do a lunar sample return mission under those constraints, but even if you could, it can only return a small amount of moon rock. Let’s say 100 grams (1/4 pound). If you break it up into 0.1-gram (1/300 oz, about 1/8" cube) pieces, you need to sell each one for $100,000. And you need to find 1000 people who are willing to pay that much. Seems unlikely to me. Of course there is economy of scale if you use a larger spacecraft, but if you bring too much moon rock, it becomes less scarce and less valuable.
Most minerals found on the rock is available on earth, so there’s no intrinsic value in moon rock. The only possible exception is Helium-3, which may be valuable as fusion reactor fuel, but it’s a moot point since we don’t actually have fusion reactors. (At least none that produces non-negligible amounts of energy.)
Once Manny and I get the mass driver aimed right, you’ll get more the moon rocks than you’ll ever want…
That’s right, because the Apollo moon rocks are property of NASA, and federal law prevents their sale. President Nixon gave out about a hundred moon rocks to foreign heads of state, and some of those have made their way on to the market (generally as the result of theft). The Honduran case recently generated a lot of press.
This reminds me of a short story I once read by Wilson Wu, called “The Hole in the Hole”. It was a mildly amusing story about a guy who finds access to the moon via a space-portal within a rickety shed in a junk yard in Queens. After some exploration, he plotted to recover one of the rovers to sell and make him rich. Even though the access was this easy, can’t say he had much luck. Good luck with yours! 
Woman sues NASA for ownership of vial of space dust
She claims it was gift from Apollo veteran Neil Armstrong
Serious answer - isotope ratios.