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NASA Missing Hundreds of Moon Rocks
New submitter Minion of Eris writes "It seems NASA can't keep track of its goodies. A recent audit discovered that moon rocks have been missing for 30 years, loaned displays have gone unreturned, and book-keeping has been generally poor. From the article: 'In a report issued by the agency's inspector general on Thursday, NASA concedes that more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material were stolen or have been missing since 1970. That includes 218 moon samples that were stolen and later returned and about two dozen moon rocks and chunks of lunar soil that were reported lost last year. NASA, which has lent more than 26,000 samples, needs to keep better track of what is sent to researchers and museums, the report said. The lack of sufficient controls "increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost," the report concluded.'"
Yeah so these things are worth millions of dollars (to collectors and researchers alike) and you call them "missing"? Perhaps 'stolen' would be a better word considering the worth of these rocks. Also, I can't believe that the story of the Texan intern who stole and sold lunar samples from NASA and then had sex on top of them with his girlfriend so that they were the first people to have sex on the moon was left out of this article.
I'm guessing they're not missing but rather have long been stolen and sold on the black market.
My work here is dung.
There's a huge source of moon-rocks around here somewhere.
I think it's more of the lack of a sufficient space program that'll lose us "unique resources."
In 2002, three NASA interns found and stole moon rocks that were stored in a safe at the Johnson Space Center lab in Houston.
They later tried to sell them online after sprinkling them on their bed and having sex on it.
I know where they are, the Elves took them.
Go get more. The reason nobody was paying much attention in the 1960's is that they never expected the supply of moon rocks would dwindle. We need to maintain permanent residence whatever we go. We went to the moon, we need to establish a base there. If we go to mars, we need to establish a permanent base there too. If we don't force ourselves down this path, we're never going to get off this rock.
Anybody has cared to check the vacuum's bags?
1) Release press statement that those samples were all fake
2) Watch eBay for auctions of said "fakes"
3) Profit!
Correct me if I am wrong, but 500 out of over 26k samples is a very very small portion of the samples they have. While I am sure the value, both financially and as to how they could contribute to science, could vary greatly between each individual sample, this doesn't appear to be some terrible blundering of recordkeeping.
There are 73 trillion tons of moon rock that /haven't/ been stolen. I'd hardly call it unique :p
Hardly unique, there's a wacking great big planet that you can see every night with lots more rocks. Just go pick a few!
They loaned out over 26,000 of these, and that's all that's gone missing? That's not bad at all. Maybe they should go into the mortgage business.
The story that really irked me is the scientist who just had it sitting on his desk for years and years, and never bothered to do any research.
I guess we need to go get some more, then!
"increases the risk that these unique resources may be lost," the report concluded.'" There are a few million lbs where we got these...lets just go back and get some.....
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
is it?
Back in the 1960's they had to start with a clean board and design the technology in less than a DECADE to fulfill the promise made by a dead president.
Now we have the knowhow, we have the technology, what's the single insurmountable obstacle to returning to our nearest solar neighbour?
Politics.
It's not even as if the technology has been locked away and forgotten, either. NASA's new launch vehicles will have first stage boosters based on the J2 engines. The manned capsules will be based on the Gemini and Apollo capsules. The Mercury-Atlas and Gemini booster stages are still in use for heavy lifting high-risk and military payloads. It just seems a sad waste to me, that such high adventure was shitcanned so fast after all those "firsts" - landing on the Moon, walking on the Moon, driving on the Moon, playing golf on the Moon. Was all that really done just to piss off the Russians? I have a difficult time putting it down to merely that. Our destiny is in space. We shouldn't let petty disagreements over distribution of finite resources stand in the way of that, or we as a species will die in our crib.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
just as long as the government has a slightly better handle on where all the plutonium is (contemporaneous cold war artifact)
i'm not too concered about escape dusty basalt
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"missing for 30 years"... "missing since 1970"... [current year: 2011] ...doesn't that mean that they've been missing for over 40 years?
A government agency and insufficient internal controls? I'm actually surprised that the audit didn't turn up missing spacecrafts.
God knows, we won't be getting anymore at anytime soon, if ever. Better keep better track of whatever we have left.
Um... why would they report the number as "500" and include 218 samples that were "returned". Wouldn't those, by definition, no longer be "lost"?
Thats nearly half.... so only 282 missing,
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nah, we learned that moon regolith is the perfect material for shooting a portal gun at. Quoth Cave Johnson:
Clearly that's where it all went.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I've worked for companies that, for book keeping reasons, would not let you as an employee take a single thing for personal possession. However, if an item was old and no longer usable, management would "turn a blind eye" if you walked out the door with it. Honestly, if it was large enough, they would help you usher it out the door.
I know moon rocks aren't the same but I wonder how many items were "lost" to the hands of astronauts and key mission controllers because they frickin' changed the world in being part of the process and NASA felt they deserved a small chunk of history.
I'm not saying it's right, but I also wouldn't want to prosecution Neil Armstrong if he left his office on his last day with a palm sized moon rock from the Apollo 11 mission, tucked away in a coffee mug.
Sssshay that again son? You were playing hookie with what? Phone the FBI please, at your earliest convenience if not sooner. (It's a case of “It's your badge son ”)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
We need more Moon rocks?
I wonder how much money they could raise if they pre-auctioned off Moon rocks to the public from a future space flight?
Washington University in St. Louis has some. Because they are so special, the entire fifth floor is under lock and key. In fact, the university tried to give the rocks back several times to NASA. However, NASA doesn't "remember" that they gave them to the University and won't take them back. Imagine the universities position!
That's no moon. Rock.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
What other pieces of the movie set are missing?
My child at the ripe old age of 4, figured this one out. Hay NASA! Get up, off you lazy excuse ridden ass, and go get some more! Time Out! One Minute, if front of all your preschool friends! And stop wasting your parents time.
.... Check eBay.
So, out of eight hundred kilos of moon rocks, some beancounter at NASA is having apoplexy about a half-kilo of rocks not having proper paperwork to document where they have gone?
He's right. These samples are unique. As long as the bureaucrats rule, NASA doesn't have a chance in Hell of going back and collecting another 800 kilos of rocks. This guy knows that these samples are irreplacible becasue he knows that NASA will never be able to do what they did back when engineers called most of the shots.
Let him rant. Just like rare earth metals, in a few years we will be able to buy all the moon rocks we want, from the Chinese.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Check with GlaDOS and Wheatley... That was the last place I heard of them ;-)
And get into the holiday spirit at http://aperturescience.com/
...where they came from
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm sure there are billions and billions of moon rocks out there.
HAND.
Why don't we sell or lease them and wipe out the deficit. Win Win for American public and capitalism.
Oh my God, look what happened to Apollo 18!!! Now my grandmother is going get attacked since I left that rock on her desk! Quick call the NSA
From what I understand NASA was handing Moon Rocks out like party favors back during the Apollo missions because they though that space/moon travel was going to become commonplace. Unfortunately things changed and now these rocks are a precious commodity. Because they were handed out in such a cavalier manor I find this whole "they're government property" claim to be rather dubious. Its like some rich guy handing out hundred dollar bills while he's swimming in money, and when hard times hit he claims all of that money was temporary loans because he verbally joked with some people that they owed him the money back.
People talk about NASA in the time of the Apollo program as a well oiled machine that could do no wrong. Well, here's evidence that it was a bureaucratic disaster. It's easy to look back with rose colored glasses and say the shuttle era was a mess, but in reality maybe it was always that way?
They had to make that conversion gel somehow.
I write bullshit
This is just part of the vast cover up that is the faked moon landings. Of course the rocks are missing we never got them!
I have never understood why the United States does not have a Museum of the Moon - just for the moon and NOTHING ELSE. For God's sake, it's the only other planet people have walked on.
All of the stuff we brought back from that other planet and all of the stuff we used to get there and back should be showcased for everyone in the world to see. The moon rocks should be right up there with the Constitution or Old Ironsides. Heck, those things should be enshrined like pieces of the True Cross. THIS IS THE BIGGEST THING THAT MAN HAS EVER DONE. The artifacts of that accomplishment should not be treated like a rock collection.
And ate it. They thought it was cheese.
I did an internship with a space industry contractor in the summer of 2005 and worked alongside their DBAs, mostly working on the database that was being used for inventory management. Partway through the summer, the lab in charge of the lunar material contacted the group I was working with regarding an update to their database. They wanted to migrate everything they had from the, I believe, late '70s DEC machines that they were still running with a hierarchal database system I had never heard of (I recall seeing some output that looked vaguely COBOL-like) to MS SQL Server 2000. There had been a failed attempt to migrate to FoxPro sometime in the early '90s, from what I heard, but they had scrapped it and just stayed with what they had in the end. At the time they were calling us, they were worried that something might fail and that they'd lose it all.
In order to better understand their organizational system, we got to don bunny suits and head into the vault where all of the samples are kept at Johnson Space Center. It was pretty fun getting a chance to go around, peek into cabinets, and just see how it was all stored in perfect condition. Since the samples they loan out to scientists need to have their origins tracked and new samples are created by breaking old ones, the samples are labeled with an increasingly long identifier as they are broken down. To give a quick (and slightly oversimplified) example, an initial sample brought back from the moon may have been labeled A. After it was broken in two, the two samples were A-1 and A-2. When the first one was broken in three, it became A-1-a, A-1-b, and A-1-c. Each of those is referred to as a sample, even though they may have originated from a single sample, and since samples can be created outside of the immediate vicinity of NASA's personnel, it's not really surprising that some samples have gone missing. Hell, NASA requires that every speck of dust be returned as a sample as well.
At the time, I think they had said that roughly 90 or 95% of the samples brought back are still in pristine, untouched condition, and are being preserved in a nitrogen-rich atmosphere to prevent oxidation. So even with all of these samples lost, the vast majority of it still exists and has yet to be studied by anyone.
Also, I didn't realize it, but NASA has all of the samples that the Soviets brought back from the moon with their unmanned lunar missions. Those are kept in one part of the vault, separate from the ones retrived by the American missions. Neat little fact that I didn't know at the time that I went into the vault.
googlephonics system.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's what I'd say if I'd led the world to believe I brought back lots of rocks from the moon while they were in fact little moonturtles that simply escaped from my lab.
0x or or snor perron?!
Yeah, it's NASA's fault~
Please explain to your son congress controls that, and tell him it's important to vote for people who understand how critical space exploration is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's a secret space program that shits on NASA. Your tax dollars fund it, but you aren't allowed to know about it.
This is why I laugh at the most pitiful stupid shit like this.
No, back in the day it was exactly the opposite. Everyone was totally focused on one goal -- getting to the Moon by 31 December 1969. Since neither the task at hand nor the time to complete it were changing, plenty of people were hired and plenty of money was spent, to be sure, but that situation also meant that any bureaucratic baloney was ignored, sidestepped, or waived. People's reputations were on the line, and nobody wanted to be part of the group/division/company/organization that kept the country from reaching the moon first. Whoever was deemed responsible for that could look forward to a lifetime of testimony before congressional investigative committees, not to mention the nation on a never-ending series of Walter Cronkite prime time Special Reports.
Not to mention not being able to get another job in your profession for the rest of your life. Being Steve Bartman would be a step up.
After 1973, however, NASA was a different entity. When a pie is growing, as NASA was in the 1960s, nobody bothers to erect any bureaucratic fences, since there's plenty of work for everyone. When the pie shrinks, however, people start trying to stake out their remaining territory, and the end is near.
Yes, this is going to be a xkcd reference:
http://xkcd.com/984/
Without Nazis who do it for them, they cannot do it. D'uh. Good luck reaching Mars!
"Wanna see my moon rock? take a look at that!"
"What do you mean it looks like a piece of gravel from the driveway?"
"Where did i get it? off ebay, why?"
end scene:
So the whole point of having a moon rock is showing it off, like a diamond. The act of proving it's a moon rock (e.g. sending it to a lab for testing) would probably end with it being confiscated from you. If you can't prove it's a moon rock, it might as well be any old piece of gravel, of which we have trillions right hear on earth.
Maybe they'll build another Luna 16.
Keep your hands to yourself, sneak-thief.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I suggest NASA be immediately punished by being made to go back on the moon and get enough rocks to replace the ones they lost.
Well are they using them for anything or are they just sitting in warehouses gathering dust? Because I wouldn't feel too bad stealing a moon rock which isn't currently doing any good or garnering any attention in some box Raiders-of-the-lost-ark-style. If I knew they were actively being used for Science(tm) then I would be a whole lot more apprehensive about it.
From the article:
In two cases, one researcher still had nine lunar samples he borrowed 35 years ago and another had 10 chunks of meteorites he kept for 14 years. Neither had ever worked on them. Another researcher had 36 moon samples and kept them for 16 years after he had finished his research.
It doesn't exactly sound like they're in very high demand for research either... They're just novelties at this point. Just focus on getting us some Mars rocks that we can catalogue and promptly forgotten about.
Is NASA sure Edgar Mitchell doesn't have them, too?
How about we just ignore Congress and go anyway? If Congress doesn't have to use real money, why should NASA?
I'm just hoping they won't end in a litterbox.
Pfft, at that point, you might as well explain that his vote will be meaningless, unless he has the mountains of money needed to convince the proles to do something other than what the TV tells them to do.
I have to question just how unique of resource they are. The moon is huge, 1/4 the size of the Earth !
Since 1970. That's 40, not 30, years.
Maybe the rocks were actually spiders that crawled away when no one was looking (Apollo anyone??). Tee hee
He really DID get a stereo (wow, TWO speakers!) with a moon-nock..rock needle. Aw, shit!
Sheesh
Sell the damn things on ebay to pay for it.
There are lots more where those came from -- we should go get a few loads.
... rocks at rockets (quite early here ;)) and was totally like "holy crap, who can steal 500 rockets and get away with it ... and why does nasa even have so many?" :D
Congress combined couldn't identify a space probe from the contents in a box of suppositories.
I have to believe it is NASA's fault, they're smarter than we are, ask'em. For starters, ISS could be used as a space platform to assemble space vehicles, it's not. The moon has more Helium3 than common sense allows for; laying on the ground. One would think that after 50 years, there would more human presence on the moon than a foot print. Post Space Shuttle development? Looks like someone went to the basement at KSC and photo shopped the blue prints from the Apollo hardware. Does anyone at NASA know that Burt Rutan's initial designs for low earth orbit launching literally blows the doors off of anything NASA has done since then. As for telescopes, not many city lights are on the moon. As for physical issues of living on the moon, we don't know because NASA won't go.
Maybe the Chinese can go get us some? (It saddens me that I can say this and it's not a troll.)