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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.
The american public payed millions of dollars of taxes to send a man to the moon and bring back moon rocks. Therefore, I find it strange and wrong that moon rocks can be in private hands.
Everybody paid to bring the rocks here, and therefore these rocks should belong to all American people, not to private owners.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
1. take some dirt from your backyard.
2. put it in a fancy glass thingy.
3. sell it.
4. PROFIT!!!!!
this particular piece may be authentic but i'm pretty sure that somebody has done the 1.2.3.4 thing above for moonrocks. i mean, if there's something thats worthless as it is but worth something because it is there are people who will try to cheat out some of that cash going around. i mean at one point there was something like many tons of the cross that jesus carries in bible circulating around collectors, if somebody doesn't go to moon soon enough there will be such a situation in time with moonrocks as well(and probably will be anyways for the "ah but this is from the first mission" rocks).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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:[.]
Face it, the moon is a dump. It's a boring, dried up wasteland, and the only reason anybody ever comes here is for the tacky little amusement park.
You mean like France and EuroDisney?
Trolling is a art,
Why do break in's always have Nixon's name somewhere in the paragraph?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
This makes the moon rock the most expensive paper weight ever!
Moon rocks do have magical properties, have you never seen Halloween 3
They better have been careful not to have taken that piece off of my land. I've got mineral rights, you know.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
if you can sell me some jupiter rock.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
I predict that within 10 years Wal-Mart will carry moon rocks imported from the Chinese, who will have a mine on the moon by then and bring rock back by the ton. Get ready for "pet moon rocks" and "moon mood rings" on the shopping channel too.
HA! I can beat that offer, on E-bay I'm selling 1-acre lots on the moon starting at $20,000. Perfect for your next home building project. Building your next home on the moon has many perks: 1. No Pollution - at least not yet 2. No pollen - great for people with allergies 3. Spectacular views of the planet Earth with ocean front views. Mission to the moon, taxes, rocket fuel, and NASA clearence fee, building permit, and contractors to build you house, sold seperatly. Buy now and get 1000 free hours of AOL via satelite to planet Earth.
DeBeers claims that a "natural" diamond is worth much, much more than a visually indistinguishable and chemically identical diamond made in the lab last Tuesday. It is priceless simply because it came from deep inside the earth, formed by intense heat and pressure over millions of years.
Similarly, a few tiny chunks of the moon are worth $50,000 while a chemically identical chunk of rock from Colorado (olivine, with traces of ilmenite and iron oxides) is basically worthless (maybe $5/ton if you bought itin bulk).It's all about the brand, baby. Symbolism sells.
Does it have "The Moon" written all the way through?
To be fair, I think it would be fair to pay with 50 "presumable" $1000 bills encased in a big blob of resin shaped like a sucker.
Never at a loss for words... because of the voices.
Or cheese.
It is illegal to sell moon rocks, but not a desk that has a moon rock in it.
Kind of like selling WMD to Iraq. You can't really sell finished nukes, bioweapons, or chemical agents, but you CAN sell all the ingredients as long as you include a statement like "don't mix 10 parts of XYZ to 3 parts ABC because that would make Sarin, and never, ever add water to the Anthrax spores".
Why this human obsession with stuff from the ground? I'm more into digital rarities, like the newest game or software. That's what I value... not dirt, or minerals. But to each, their own, I guess, eh?
How much is the lastest game from a decade ago worth? How much is a diamond or a pound of gold from a decade ago worth?
Get it now?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Especially since his user name is 'trotski'. :-)
For those who do not want to register for NYT
Here ya go
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I'm disappointed in you, Taco. How could you miss an opportunity to run "the own-a-piece-of-the-rock dept."?
So, sell now before the Chinese bring the stuff back in bulk and kill the market.
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.
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.
begin Indiana Jones mode "It belongs in a museum" end Indinana Jones mode
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.
Man, three years ago I bought my Dad an acre of land on Io from a booth at the mall around Christmastime. It only cost me 10 bucks and it even came with a deed, although the guy printed that on-site with a shitty bubble jet.
Either way, he was also selling pieces of the moon, but owning land on our moon is like owning a cabin in Aspen - it may have been cool 30 years ago, but not anymore. Jupiter's moons are the next big thing, man.
[hmm... that post started and ended with "man"... maybe i need to get out more...]
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
You would think that big piece of cheese in the desk would stink by now!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Isn't it about time we change the name of that planet to end that stupid joke once and for all?
I propose Urectum.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java