How an Intern Stole NASA's Moon Rocks

schwit1 submitted a story telling the strange tale of how in 2002, rogue NASA interns stole millions of dollars in moon rocks from a building designed not to let that happen. I'd suggest taking the whole thing with a little bit of salt.

Comments

Re:salt not required

[DerekLyons]

I was about to say the same thing - this is actually a pretty well known incident. Had the poster taken the minuscule effort required to click on any of the links in the article, he'd have found the news stories supporting the article.

The part about the neoprene suits

[Jane Q. Public]

is probably completely bogus. As was clearly shown on Mythbusters, neoprene (even thicker than the mentioned 2mm) simply does not work against thermal sensors.

Also: "... and by paying careful attention to the absorption of the powder it is possible to tell which finger came down first and so forth."

Maybe... if you are talking about a key that was pressed twice. Otherwise, forget it.

Yeah. About a teaspoon of salt. One grain for each embellishment.

Mythbusters? Bleah.

[cusco]

I have yet to see Mythbusters adequately "disprove" any damn thing. Their normal method of operation is "Well urban legend says someone did something this way, but since we only have an hour show and a low budget we're going to try to do it this other way. Didn't work? Well then it couldn't have happened and it's a myth!"

What BS. The other night they "proved" that Robin Hood couldn't have split an arrow with another arrow by using cheap factory-made lathe-turned arrows with grain running every-which-way. Since every arrow hit broke following the irregular grain near the nock they decided that NO ONE EVER could have split an arrow. I've actually seen a hand-made straight-grained arrow that had been split from nock to head, with the other arrow still embedded, so I know for a fact that their show was BS.

Even worse was the show where they tried to debunk the story of someone mounting a RATO (Rocket Assisted Take Off) bottle to their old Chevy Impala back in the 60s (when you could buy them surplus from the Air Force). Not having access to an actual JATO bottle, and too lazy and cheap to examine the actual plans and make a replica, the bozos cobbled together some POS rocket that probably didn't have enough thrust to get itself off the ground and put it on a car instead. Not surprisingly it failed, and now thousands of people believe that the story has been debunked.

I certainly don't object to the IDEA of their program, in fact I think it's a great idea. I just wish that they had hired someone who could actually do it RIGHT.

Re:Millions of dollars?

[ComputerSlicer23]

I don't know, it's probably literally closer to "priceless", which isn't infinitely valuable, but a market can't be established, therefore a value/price cannot be determined (see the description of "Neoclassical Value" on the Wikipedia link, lots of artwork is priceless in this sense, even though it sells for a specific value).

What you're describing is the cost, not the price or value. If I blew $100K on rebuilding a fully restored mint condition Ford Fiesta from 1994, doesn't mean that I could sell it for that, or that it represented the value. It means I blew $100K, and now had a car that is probably worth 1/10th at best. That's just a guess.

Even if you were going to present it that way, it's not like the rocks are the only thing that came out of that money. So if you want to determine if it was "worth it", or "profitable" to go to the moon, the rocks aren't the only thing of value to come out of all that money being spent.

Kirby