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

salt not required

[Kartoffel]

Haven't read TFA yet, but the general story is true. I worked at JSC and knew Shae.

The samples were in a floor safe that they rolled out of the building on a dolly. The sting was set up as if a Belgian rockhound wanted to buy some of the samples, and they agreed to meet in Florida. The 3 other interns crossed state lines for the sting. Shae stayed in TX that weekend to attend scuba classes.

Re:salt not required

[The Grim Reefer2]

I'd suggest taking the whole thing with a little bit of salt.

Isn't that what interns said... Minus the salt part.

This article is hoplessly wrong pulp fiction

[modemboy]

Not only is it somewhat painful to read, as far as I can tell it is mostly fiction, no fact checking at all. And it also seems partially plagiarized from this article:
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-moonrocks23jun06,1,1392690.story?coll=la-home-magazine

And that one is by an actual reporter with actual fact checking. Obviously some of it is left up to how the perpetrators described it, but it doesn't have stupid made up stuff like a nitrogen filled lab and thermal suits and such. I would guess the crime played out more like the LA Times article, rather than this embellished piece of pulp fiction

Re:This article is hoplessly wrong pulp fiction

[jandrese]

I think they just calculated the replacement cost.

Re:This article is hoplessly wrong pulp fiction

[femtobyte]

I did a summer internship with NASA a few years after this incident, and of course the interns all got a nice tour of the moonrock facility.

As modemboy points out, the "nitrogen filled lab" and such is pure bunk. The moonrocks are kept in nitrogen-purged safes (and in a separate room with nitrogen-filled gloveboxes used for preparing samples to send out to researchers), but the room containing the safes isn't itself filled with nitrogen. There is an "air-lock," but it's the usual type of clean-room airlock, used to keep out dust between the changing room where you suit up in disposable clean-room clothes and the lab itself.

Re:This article is hoplessly wrong pulp fiction

[Mursk]

Well, presumably the rooms are at least 78% or so nitrogen filled. Maybe they just rounded up?

Re:Blech

[Kartoffel]

Thad was a real type-A personality type. Very self confident and extroverted. I don't know much about how the other students got involved in the heist, but I'd imagine Thad was the ringleader.

Shae was probably allowed in on the plan because she could have supplied the scuba gear for breathing in the nitrogen-purged storage room. There's no reason they would have needed wetsuits, though.

Re:Blech

[flyingsquid]

particularly like the bit where the interns in question laid the moonrocks down and a mattress and screwed on top of them, thereby making the contamination of the spent samples even worse.

In a related story, NASA announced a groundbreaking discovery today, with some startling implications. The good news is, they have discovered that the Moon supports microbial life. The bad news is, it's chlamydia.

Picture of Tiffany - You know you're curious

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah yeah this isn't fark, but how often do we get cute female cat burglars to ogle at?

http://www.baylor.edu/biology/index.php?id=32089 /would hit it

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.