Slashdot Mirror
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.
I think it's more of the lack of a sufficient space program that'll lose us "unique resources."
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.
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.
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.