Moon Dust From 1969 Landing Sells for Half a Million Dollars at Auction

A pinch of dust from the 1969 moon landing has offered for over $500,000 at Bonhams in New York. The sale marks the very first time a contingency sample from Apollo 11 is marketed lawfully at auction, in accordance to Bonhams, because NASA usually claims entire possession of all lunar materials. A 20-12 months saga whole of lawsuits and fraud authorized the exceptional lunar soil to go less than the hammer.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong picked up a bit of moon dust, positioned it inside of a plastic bag, set the plastic bag within a cloth bag, and brought it back again to Earth. The dust that offered was taken from the seams of that fabric bag (moon dust is very sticky).

Amongst 1969 and 1972, astronauts brought back 842 lbs . of lunar product. The Bonhams moon dust, marketed last Wednesday, April 13 as element of its Place Historical past sale, contains five samples for a microscope, established on carbon tape on top of the aluminum stubs employed with an Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The carbon tape on every stub is much less than 50 percent an inch large.

Even this small sum of moon dust has prompted a many years-extended struggle. The dust belonged to Nancy Lee Carlson, a law firm with an fascination in geology, who bought it in a 2015 United States Marshals auction for $995. Carlson despatched it to NASA to authenticate, but NASA seized the bag soon after they recognized it was from Apollo 11. Carlson sued, the bag was returned to her, and she sold it for $1.8 million at Sotheby’s in 2017.

Nonetheless, NASA experienced saved a portion of Carlson’s moon dust to sample beneath a microscope. Carlson sued again, and five out of the 6 samples have been returned to her.

The story of how Carlson acquired the dust in the initially location is even additional weird. Just after Armstrong returned to Earth with the bag, it was loaned to the Cosmosphere area museum, a Smithsonian affiliate in Hutchinson, Kansas, an hour’s push from Wichita.

The museum’s director at the time, Max Ary, was located to be stealing and promoting museum artifacts. In 2006, he was convicted on costs of theft, fraud, and income laundering and sentenced to three years in prison.

When the FBI raided Ary’s dwelling, they identified numerous stolen objects, together with Armstrong’s bag. Nonetheless, the bag was bewildered for something else, and its benefit went unrecognized. As a seized asset, it was shown in a US Marshals auction, where by Carlson acquired it in 2015.

Even with its intriguing backstory, the hammer price tag for Carlson’s moon dust fell small of Bonhams’s pre-sale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million.

The US authorities claims all possession of lunar materials and has long gone to terrific lengths to recuperate it from personal citizens, most notably in 2011, when NASA seized lunar material from a 74-calendar year-old female who was striving to promote it. The dust was the dimension of a grain of rice and concealed inside a paperweight. NASA executed a sting operation at a Denny’s diner, sending in an undercover agent and detaining the woman in the parking lot.

When Armstrong’s bag that contains the dust bought at Sotheby’s in 2017, some activists denounced the auction, contacting it “lunar larceny.”

“The bag belongs in a museum, so the entire globe can share in and rejoice the common human accomplishment it represents,” Michelle Hanlon, co-founder of the group For All Moonkind Inc., said in a assertion at the time.

Now that Carlson has offered all of her embattled moon dust, we don’t know when, if at any time, the general public will be ready to buy the dust all over again.