TANSTAAFL, you know.
A couple of very good articles on lunar meteorites and their identification. They fall pretty rarely at the moment (no recent major cratering events on the moon) but when they do happen, Earth gets quite a bit of fallout–one of the articles mentions a study on the Tycho crater which by itself probably resulted in between 25 and 100 cubic kilometers of lunar meteorites hitting the Earth (over a period of around 10 million years, with the majority happening over the first 50,000 years.)
Ignoring the mechanics and cost of getting rocks back from the moon, Id think there would be a great market for lunar rocks with indisputable provenance. For the first couple of hundred rocks. At some point, the values would drop, all the people willing to spend stupid money for one would already have one. Bring back enough of them, and you’d be just another Franklin Mint selling things labeled “Collectible”, but with no value because everyone already has one.
There’s a story that during the Apollo program NASA provided lunar samples to many universities for analysis and tests. And one university that did not get one was very angry that their rival did an d complained VERY long and loudly. Eventually, just to effing shut them up, a staffer at NASA picked up an interesting looking rock from a field nearby and sent it to them.
After several months had passed that university sent in the results from their testing. “While after analysis there are still some questions about this test sample, we can definitely state that the cow did, in fact, jump over the moon.”
Here’s a Washington Post article about this dated June 13th but no year …
$300,000 per gram … or $2 x 10[sup]31[/sup] for the whole Moon … that’s why we can’t carve our initials in it …
I don’t know where that 10 to 15 cc/15 to 22.5 figure came from, but if the woman claims to have that much, she is very, very, very full of shit. A believable personal lunar dust sample is more realistically measured in double-digit milligrams. Like, if you open the vial and sneeze, you’ll never see your sample again. Something like this. Not even Neil Armstrong was carrying around that amount of lunar dust.
Here’s a picture of the bag Neil Armstrong smuggled back to Earth … looks to me it could hold 15 grams of dirt …
“Smuggled” isn’t exactly accurate–he may have brought back a bag that he technically should have left behind, but he didn’t sneak anything past anyone. You can rest assured every single object in that capsule was examined by one or more people and treated seriously, especially considering that early on there was an overabundance of caution in case the astronauts brought back moon germs. Apparently (if the story is to be believed) others accidentally exposed to dust were also quarantined. Neil didn’t have that vial shoved up his backside for the three weeks of isolation–if it was in his bag, somebody saw it. If someone allowed him to take it as a souvenir, they and Armstrong were seriously breaking both policy and law. (They couldn’t even legally own flight artifacts until 2012.)
Look at the size of these dust samples provided for study and misplaced until 2013 and compare it to the size of the tube (an image that looks to fit the speculation in the Washington Post article. That is a gigantic amount of lunar dust to be in private hands. And we are supposed to believe that not only did Neil Armstrong choose and manage to keep it, but three years later he gave it away for a birdwatching buddy to give to his young daughter knowing how illegal it was and how much it could blow up if she decided to take it for show-and-tell. Implying that he was either that caviler about giving away his entire stolen sample to a near-stranger or that he had even more and could afford to give away that much. I find the story deeply, deeply suspicious and I think that the woman is overly credulous about a story that her father probably made up.
No, what you do is, you write a proposal to a science funding agency (like NASA) describing how you’d get rock samples back from the Moon, and team up with scientists to study those rocks and produce science results. If they think you can pull it off for a reasonable cost, they will pay you to do it. They’ll even pay your scientist partners.
Certainly on the way down, but astronauts can be sneaky. A great story about John Young onboard 1965 Gemini 3 (he later was on Apollo 16 and commander of the first Space Shuttle): How John Young Smuggled a Corned-Beef Sandwich into Space
With a space-to-ground transcript when the act was discovered, and museum replica in acrylic no less of the evidence.
Gary Dahl sold 1.5 million Pet Rocks in 1975 for $4 each. So, with some marketing, there was a market for plain rocks. Moon rocks–why not? Just the tiny niggle that you can’t just dig them up at the beach, and moon missions cost real money.
Alan Shepard’s daughter has a pair of earrings made from moon rocks he brought back from Apollo XIV.
As the old saying goes, cite? I did some key-word searching and couldn’t find anything on Google about that. I also have failed to find any mention that Apollo astronauts (or their families) are exempt from rules against ownership of Apollo lunar material. I have found plenty of material that counters that, though. For instance, in reference to the case of a lunar sample recovered from the debris of a museum fire in Alaska, former senior investigator for NASA’s Office of Inspector General Joe Gutheinz said:
And in this article, NASA spokesman Douglas Blanchard said:
This woman was busted for trying to sell a paperweight containing a small bit of (confirmed) lunar material that she claimed was given to her husband by Neil Armstrong, but:
In 2000, there was a bill for an “Apollo Exploration Award Act of 2000”, which would award 32 Apollo astronauts or their descendants with a small lunar sample that could not be “sold, traded, bartered, or exchanged for anything of value” or “otherwise transferred, other than to a family member of the original recipient of the award or by inheritance.” I’m not seeing if this ever became a law or if the awards were ever given, but there would be no need for this proposed law if Apollo astronauts were allowed to keep samples.
tl;dr: I can’t find evidence that even Apollo astronauts and their families would be legally anything other than felons if they owned lunar material, and Neil Armstrong gave an affidavit explicitly denying ever having given lunar material to anyone.
My cite is my personal knowledge. I know her, and have seen the earrings. She also has one of her dad’s flight suits he wore on the Apollo XIV missions.
My understanding is that the Nasa rules put in place regarding mission memorabilia didn’t go into effect until after Apollo program was shut down.
Case in point, the golf club that Shepard used to hit golf balls on the moon is in a USGA museum, not in possession of Nasa.