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FBI Arrests 4 College Interns For Stealing Lunar Materials

Posted by Hemos on from the striking-a-blow-for-profits dept.

An anonymous reader "Today, the fourth member of a group of college interns working at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston turned herself in after being charged with conspiracy to steal government property. Click2Houston.com has an article with a video feed covering many details of the case. Apparently, three of the alleged theives went to Florida and tried to sell, online, the 5 oz. of moon rocks and meteorite material they lugged out of the JSC in a 600lb case. Here's another article from the Houston Chronicle."

4 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. What did they expect.. by Chicane-UK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And they didn't expect to get caught? I might understand if they were trying to sell a harddrive they had stolen from work, or a 2nd hand base unit they had sneaked out. But a few hundred pounds of moonrock are sure to be noticed, especially when you sell em on eBay!

    They deserve to get caught..

    --
    "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
  2. Who would buy these? by Myco · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What kind of idiot would buy moon rocks over the Internet for any appreciable sum of money? How exactly would you verify what you were buying? And what kind of idiot wouldn't know that any moon rocks for sale must be stolen property?

    There is, last time I checked, *one* moon rock in the U.S. (or the world?) that is in any way available to the public. You can go and touch it. I did. Whee. Looked like a rock, to me.

    --
    My deviantArt site
  3. Re:Government property? by MadFarmAnimalz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Us Government property, UN property... Hmm. Am I missing a distinction in there?

    Let's not split geopolitical hairs.

    --
    Blearf. Blearf, I say.
  4. Re:Government property? by the+gnat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's shocking how many people in this thread agree with you. As government property, it was available for research (one of the linked articles has an archived article discussing this) and held in trust for the people. In fact, that article says they get requests from institutions all over the world to study the rocks. Anyone who wants their own personal moon rocks can fund their own expedition to get them. I doubt the feds would have much of a case trying to wrest those away.

    At any rate, the point here is that these particular rocks were most certainly US property, and these assholes were trying to sell them to a private collector. I fail to see any gray area.