Piece of the Moon for Sale

Symon Gold writes "A desk set purportedly containing a piece of moon rock is up for auction at Lelands.com. Listing here. The New York Times (free registration required) has a story about the piece--a retirement gift given to Joe Healy, an engineer at NASA's Lunar Receiving Laboratory who worked on the Apollo missions and who died a decade ago. The auction runs until 9 p.m. on December 4th with an opening bid of $50,000."

Comments

Google NYT

[Coneasfast]

For those who do not want to register for NYT

Here ya go

Supply and demand.

[AzureLunatic]

Supply and demand. Big supply, low demand. Low supply, big demand. Low demand, low price. High demand, high price.

See the thread involving DeBeers and artificially created diamond shortages.

The US might do better to auction off a few small pieces to the highest bidders, if they were going to go that route for fundraising.

Re:Legal?

[MerlTurkin]

It's illegal to sell NASA moon rocks brougth back from the Apollo missions. However, Lunar Meteorites are a different story. I have a 9mg piece of DAG 400 and there are others available on the market as well. Mars rock is also available, I have a 32mg piece of DAG 476 and a speck of Zagami. But beware who you buy your specimen(s) from. Learn who the legit dealers are. Do your homework first.

Re:private ownership??

[MrPerfekt]

Didn't _anybody_ RTFA?

It's a resin mold of a moon rock with "presumably" dust from the bottom of the box they were toted in. I shit you not, that's from the description (which you didn't read). So the title of the article is misleading which in turn is resulting in these screwed up comments.