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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."
I hope that in a few years the guy who buys this will be kicking himself for wasting money on a rock, instead of saving for a trip to the moon which could be practical in 10 years.
Celebrities are like ads, if we all ignore them, they'll just go away.
They also disallowed auctions of all WTC memorabilia (even that ashtray you really bought there in 1982) shortly after 9/11, and auctions of anything even claiming to be Shuttle Columbia debris before most of it hit the ground.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
NASA calls lunar material priceless and so the first thing insurance companies ask them is how much would it cost to replace. So, NASA values it at the cost of sending up another Saturn V.
This sample should have been donated to scientific research. The fact that it could end up in the hands of a private owner who will do no more than say, "Look at my moon rock!" is disturbing. The article has an image of the rock. It's hard to judge size in the image, but it's more than a few grams.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
That's an interesting story, but you've been given a version with a strange spin on it. The moon rock was given by Nixon, not to the country but to a military dictator the US supported, Gen. Osvaldo Lopez Arellano. That dictator didn't recogize it as being valuable, and gave it to one of his colonels. There it sat, in private hands, until a US business man, Alan Rosen, started snooping around. He eventually found the owner, and bought the rock for $50,000. He was pretty surprised to find out when he took the rock in to be viewed by a potential buyer that it was to be confiscated. You can read about it in some detail here and here.
doing some further research I found this in a NASA newsletter... :))
"The OIG's investigative arm conducts criminal and regulatory investigations in which NASA is a victim. Recently, we have investigated: MOON ROCKS Finally, in an ongoing investigation we seized a desk set that allegedly contained scraps of lunar material. The set, which was owned by a dealer in rare objects, had originally been given to a retiring NASA engineerin 1970. Against NASA policy, the engineer's coworkers had worked some scraps of lunar materials into the desk." Newletter HERE strange that its being acutioned, but NASA Seems to have previously confiscated it???? I know I won't be bidding...not that I could
People have been talking about space tourism for a very long time but look at what's happened so far. Manned space travel is more or less at a standstill. Certainly there's technological potential for a lot more but it's just not happening.
DeBeers [i]doesn't{/i] do business in the US. They did until a DoJ looked into anti-trust suit. Then they informed each of their American buyers that they would have to buy from an assigned agent in (usually) London. These agents are not employees of DeBeers but independent distributors who have agreed to undisclosed terms with DeBeers.
It's not exactly a free trade purchase either. An American buyer must either buy the entire lot they are offered or decline it, with the clear threat that the agent won't bother making offers to them again, if they decline. Even though most American buyers have expressed a reticence to speak, because they might not be offered any more lots (I don't have any responsibility to offer to sell you anything, even if I offer it to your neighbor) a substantial body of disclosures and dealer complaints have built up over the decades.
The thriving trade in diamonds between American dealers exists primarily because they can't choose to pick and choose what they buy from the agents, and are therefore forced to trade/buy the stones from their mixed lots to get the stones they want.
How can they get away with this? A) through agreements and open market purchases, they control tha vast majority of the world's large lots; and B) they don't transact sales directly in the US, so our laws don't apply. They only directly transact in antions where the laws allow them to conduct business as they wish - generally small nations where their money and/or a strong local traditional diamond trade affords them considerable influence - and not just third world nations: they have a special status in the Netherlands, because Amsterdam has been a major diamond center for centuries.