<<
There has since been widespread failure to
regard these trinkets as the national – or
rather, solar – treasures that they are. It
is believed that of the 270 total Moon rocks
bunged around to the nations of the world
by the U.S., as many as 180 might be
unaccounted for.
There are some about which simply nothing
is known, and others about which what is
known is truly wretched. Ireland’s Apollo 11
rock was accidentally tossed into a landfill
in 1977 during the clearing-up of a fire in
the observatory which housed it. Romania’s
Apollo 17 rock seems to have been quietly
flogged o by the estate of the late dictator
Nicolae Ceausescu, shortly after his overthrow
and execution in 1989. Malta’s Apollo 17 rock
was stolen from a barely guarded museum
in 2004: the raisin-sized chunk might have
been worth $5 million. Alaska’s Apollo 11 rock
was recovered from the ruin of Anchorage’s
Transportation Museum, which burned
down in 1973, by the curator’s stepson,
Coleman Anderson. (Later mildly famous
after appearing on the reality show Deadliest
Catch, Anderson briefly attempted to claim
ownership of the rock, before agreeing in
2012 to return it to the state.) Canada’s
Apollo 17 rock languished in a storage
facility in Quebec for at least 30 years.
The United States would be within its
rights to wonder out loud why it bothered,
if this was the thanks it was going to get,
but the custodianship of Moon rocks by
America has also been other than exemplary.
Even NASA – the one organisation you
might have expected to take Moon rock
security seriously – has been bewilderingly
lackadaisical. In 2011, a report by NASA’s
Oice of Inspector General concluded that
517 Moon rock samples had gone missing.
Some had been taken home by researchers
who’d subsequently retired, relocated, or
died. Others had been loaned by NASA
to museums and institutions, which
had lost them.The combination of Moon rock’s cachet and
the haphazardness of its policing sounds
ideal for the creation of a black market (U.S.
citizens are not permitted to own any of the
Moon rock recovered by the Apollo missions).
It is diicult, however, to sell a commodity
that no purchaser will be able to even tell
anybody about – this is why professional art
thieves tend to shy away from well-known
works. What is known of the Moon rock
trade is mostly a farrago of incompetence,
hubris and outright fraud.In 1995, a piece of Moon rock was oered
for sale by a Manhattan auction gallery: the
specimen was seized by the FBI, and two
brothers, Ronald and Brian Trochelmann, later
pleaded guilty to trying to sell what turned out
to be a rather more earthly artefact. In 1998,
Honduras’ lost Apollo 17 rock was recovered
when its hapless owner, retired colonel Roberto
Ugarte, replied to a newspaper advertisement
placed by NASA and the U.S. Postal Service
as a sting operation to flush out pedlars of
bogus Moon rocks. In 2011, a Californian
woman, Joann Davis, approached NASA
about trying to sell a paperweight containing
a rice-grain-sized Moon pebble, which shesaid had been given to her late husband,
an Apollo 11 engineer, by Neil Armstrong.
Federal agents were dispatched to arrest her
at the rendezvous. (Davis later sued NASA,
citing unreasonable seizure – of herself,
rather than the paperweight.)So many Moon rocks have gone missing that
one American lawyer and professor, Joseph
Gutheinz – who worked on the Honduras
sting – employed them as exercises for his
students at the University of Phoenix. The
Moon Rock Project has since tracked down at
least 78 of the United States’ carelessly treated
gifts. Among the Project’s more picturesque
triumphs was the recovery of Cyprus’s Apollo
17 rock. It was long assumed to have gone
astray amid the chaos of a coup d’état in 1974,
in which the presidential palace in Nicosia
was set ablaze, and the president chased into
exile. But it turned out that the rock had
never been presented: the U.S. ambassador
to Cyprus, Rodger Davies, was killed during
the revolt, and America’s representatives had,
understandably, other priorities. An American
diplomat’s son recovered the rock: though
he tried to sell it illegally in 2003, he was
eventually persuaded to return it to NASA.While it is possible to own Moon rock of
a sort, the news is bad for anybody fancying
an especially exotic doorstop. A fraction of
a single gram of the lunar soil recovered
by one of the Soviet Union’s unmanned
lunar missions sold at auction in 1993 for
$442,500. In 2017, Neil Armstrong’s lunar
sample bag, laced with traces of Moon dust,
fetched $1.8 million – and NASA went to
court trying to get that back, too. Diamonds
suddenly don’t seem quite so extravagant. •THE UNITED STATES WOULD BE
WITHIN ITS RIGHTS TO WONDER
WHY IT BOTHERED, IF THIS WAS
THE THANKS IT WAS GOING TO GET.