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Moon Rock Winds Up In Court
Lothar+0 writes "In United States v. Lucite ball containing lunar material (an actual case, I'm not making this up, folks), the feds are suing to get back a moon rock from an American who brought it back from Honduras. They're alleging that this rock from the Apollo 17 mission is stolen property; ironic considering that NASA took something that wasn't under U.S. jurisdiction."
This summer I'm working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and some of the people near where I work have gotten a few grams of lunar material (Apollo 15, IIRC) from NASA for an experiment aiming to figure out the material's age of formation. Now they only need to look at a particular tiny part of the sample and NASA expects to get the rest back.
Now none of that is unreasonable, but what is unreasonable is the insurance policy they have to take out on the material against theft, accidental lost or destruction. Now insurers naturally want to know the value of what they are insuring. NASA's official and much repeated line is that all lunar material is priceless. This poses a serious problem for insurers, so the next question was what is the cost to replace the sample. No joke, they figured the cost of the policy, and hence the premiums, based on the cost of building a rocket, flying to the moon, collecting a new sample, and bringing it back. Not only that, but two members of the Berkeley physics department are officially down on paper as having volunteered to make the trip should it become neccesary.
I don't know what they are paying exactly, and being in a secured area of a restricted access research lab probably helps keep down the cost, but still it's not cheap holding on to lunar material that NASA expects to get back.