July 24, 2009
Can You Legally Own a Piece of the Moon?
A Moon rock on Mt. Everest: Not for keeps
Mr. Ian Sheffield of Edinburgh Scotland is miffed. He claims to have not one, but two dust samples of the Moon—one from the Apollo 11 mission and another from the Apollo 15 mission. He explains that he bought these lunar samples “from a dealer” about 3 years ago. The article does not indicate how much he paid for them, but he does allow that each is valued at “around £2000” (about $3300) each.
A problem arose when he planned to display his samples to the public. He apparently wrote to NASA asking if he could exhibit them. To his astonishment, NASA refused to give him permission and demanded the return of the samples, claiming that the lunar dust in his possession was property of the United States government.
Mr. Sheffield’s story of how the samples came into his possession is interesting. He states the dust came off a camera film pack to which a technician in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory was accidentally exposed. Because no one was sure the lunar samples would not contain some possible primitive (and pathogenic) organisms when the Apollo 11 crew first returned to Earth, they had to spend three weeks in quarantine. Anybody in the LRL exposed to lunar material was compelled to join the astronauts in their quarantine. The technician who was exposed went into isolation and (the story claims) upon his release, “was given the dust as a memento.”
My antennae went up at this point. No lunar samples are “given” to private individuals. Each piece of the Moon returned by the Apollo astronauts is carefully accounted for and resides in the Lunar Curatorial Facility in Houston, where they are kept in two separate hurricane-proof vaults. Many lunar samples are loaned to scientific institutions for study. The only lunar samples given away (of which I am aware) were to about a hundred national leaders during President Nixon’s 1969 world tour. The beautiful “Space Window” in the Washington National Cathedral, honoring man’s landing on the Moon, holds a 7.18-gram basalt from Mare Tranquillitatis, on loan to the Cathedral. Other moon rocks were presented to the Apollo astronauts (and Walter Cronkite) in 2004. However, each plaque came with a catch: the lunar samples can not be personally held by the recipients, and must be displayed at a local school or museum. Recently, Astronaut Scott Parazynski was loaned a sample of the Moon’s regolith that he carried to the summit of Mount Everest.
Some diplomatic gifts of lunar samples have found their way onto the black market. A notorious case is a sample presented to the people of Honduras back in 1969. This sample turned up during a NASA Inspector General “sting” which was designed to catch dealers of fake lunar samples. To the agents’ surprise, they were offered a genuine lunar rock: asking price, $5 million. A meeting was arranged and the rock (and presumably, the seller) was seized. Another lunar sample was stolen from a museum in Malta between 1990 and 1994; it was recovered in another sting operation in 1998.
The federal government forbids private ownership of any Apollo sample. Yet, such samples show up every now and then. The most common form they take is dust stuck to adhesive tape (an easy way to “clean” the surface of some exposed sample container, tool, or space suit used on the lunar surface). Mr. Sheffield’s sample is likely to be one of these pieces. Its status, I was surprised to find out, is legally uncertain. Although NASA has sued in court to recover any such bootleg sample, no prosecution has succeeded, except for those caught (literally) in the act of theft. In an embarrassing incident for NASA, a summer intern and two companions carried a safe full of lunar samples out of a building at Johnson Space Center (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up). They were apprehended while trying to sell them at bargain basement prices and subsequently prosecuted.
It was rumored for years that several of the Apollo astronauts held samples from their respective missions. If they did, it was probably inadvertent—the lunar dust is extremely adhesive and it is possible that smudges of lunar dust clung to personal items returned from the Moon in their Personal Preference Kits. Alan Bean, who documents the Apollo experience through his oil paintings, is said to add ground-up patches retrieved from his lunar space suit to his works. His reasoning is that because his suit was dirty with lunar dust, some of that dust must find its way into his paintings, giving them a true “lunar” ambiance.
So Mr. Ian Sheffield of Edinburgh may be home free. I might suggest to him that given their quasi-legal status, he is probably better off not calling attention to his possession of these unique artifacts. In fact, although NASA frowns on owning stolen Apollo lunar samples, there are dozens of lunar samples available for sale on eBay. A number of meteorites recovered on Earth, came from the Moon. Although most of them belong to national governments that sponsor the recovery of meteorites from Antarctica, several are in private hands and can be bought and sold, just as any commodity. Right now, there is a very nice anorthositic breccia from the lunar highlands for sale. Better hurry though – the sale only lasts another day. Oh yes, the asking price: a mere $144,000.
By the way, over the years, I have been asked to look at a few “lunar” samples that were in fact, lunar fakes. Caveat Emptor!
13 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
The web editors have closed comments for this blog.
This is interesting. The market price for Moon rocks seems to be about $1,000 USD per gram. So if a private consortium could land on the Moon for say $200 million, all they would have to do is bring back about 200 kg of cool Moon rocks to break even. . . .
Comment by Warren Platts — July 30, 2009 @ 4:06 pm
Warren,
A difficult proposition. Each Apollo mission brought back between 60 and 110 kg; this was possible with the large ascent stage of a capable system. Current studies of robotic sample return from the Moon typically return a couple of kilograms of soil and rock, tops. Thus, a robotic mission would find it difficult to bring back the amount of sample you imagine.
Keeping such a mission below $200 million cost is a whole other story…..
But I like your idea. There may well be a future market in lunar samples as gem stones.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — July 31, 2009 @ 5:21 am
Who says lunar samples have to be carried back on the same vehicle? It wouldn’t be hard to carry a catapult to the Moon and repeatedly launch lunar material into Earth orbit, from which they could be collected and returned to Earth for sale.
Comment by Bob Carver — July 31, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
Bob,
Good idea! But then you have the problem of finding the lunar rocks somewhere in space after they have been hurled off the Moon. Space is very big.
However, your idea is a good one. People have been looking at the idea of a “mass driver” that would electromagnetically catapult things off the Moon, into orbit around the Earth. If we ever make rocket propellant on the Moon, this would be a good way to get it into space, where it could then be used to re-fuel spacecraft.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — August 1, 2009 @ 8:14 am
So, Dr. Spudis, what do you know about kimberlite deposits on the Moon? Have any precious or semi-precious stones been found on the Moon so far? What about things like GOLD! Yes, I know that gold deposits on Earth are hydrothermically produced. But isn’t it true that there used to be a shallow water ocean on the Moon? In which case, we could expect water to diffuse down into the lunar mantle, and then percolate back up and leave behind deposits of all sorts of useful things.
Just a thought.
Comment by Warren Platts — August 1, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
Warren,
Most deposits of gems and precious metals on Earth typically involve volatiles in their emplacement — usually water (steam) but also carbon dioxide, halogens and other exotic species. Most all of these are largely absent from the Moon and always have been. The “ocean” that used to be on the Moon you refer to is a “magma ocean”, which refers to the ancient time when the outer few hundred kilometers of the Moon was completely molten. In other words, an ocean of molten rock, not water. Indigenous lunar water is present only in vanishingly tiny amounts.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — August 1, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
Dr. Spudis said:
“The “ocean” that used to be on the Moon you refer to is a “magma ocean”, which refers to the ancient time when the outer few hundred kilometers of the Moon was completely molten. In other words, an ocean of molten rock, not water. Indigenous lunar water is present only in vanishingly tiny amounts.”
I can’t remember where I thought I had read somewhere that there might have very briefly, geologically speaking, been some water on the surface of the Moon right after it first formed. . . . Maybe it was just my imagination.
Be that as it may, we know that the standard theory is that the water deposits posited at the poles are the result of allochthonous comets; yet there are alternative explanations:
http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2008/07/moon08
“In a paper published in the July 10 issue of the journal Nature, the team, led by Alberto Saal, assistant professor of geological sciences at Brown, believes that the water was contained in magmas erupted from fire fountains onto the surface of the Moon more than 3 billion years ago. About 95 percent of the water vapor from the magma was lost to space during this eruptive “degassing,” the team estimates. But traces of water vapor may have drifted toward the cold poles of the Moon, where they may remain as ice in permanently shadowed craters.”
Then there are those mysterious “gas leaks”:
http://lunarscience.arc.nasa.gov/articles/erupting-gas-may-cause-lunar-flashes
““If you tie all this together in one package, you can convince yourself there’s a story here,” says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. “At one time the Moon had volatiles; it might still have some remnant of those in the deep interior,” he says.”
So can we say for sure that there haven’t been hydrothermal processes analogous to those on Earth capable of concentrating valuable minerals like GOLD?
THerefore, I respectfully request a blog post on primordial volatiles, please, sir. The blog post should discuss the ISRU significance of such primoridials, especially at the gas leak zones.
You know, basalt flows are capable of forming both seals and storage zones for commercial natural gas deposits right here on Earth. Might it be possible that similar formations on the Moon might also contain valuable gas pockets that might be drillable using conventional oil and gas techniques?
Comment by Warren Platts — August 1, 2009 @ 11:09 pm
Warren,
It all goes to my statement above — yes, there are volatiles in the Moon, but they are present in extremely small amounts.
Maybe I’ll do a blog post on the details of this topic sometime in the future.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — August 2, 2009 @ 6:18 am
In 1970, NASA sold medallions commemorating the 1st Lunar Landing. The medallions were made from metal from the spacecrafts Eagle & Columbia; so from the theory of Moon dust sticking to the Eagle, and anything that came in contact with it, these medallions likely contain some Moon dust.
I purchased one of these medallions in 1970, but it isn’t exactly clear how one could determine if it contains any traces of the dust (also, since the Eagle was left in orbit, it isn’t clear how the metal from the Eagle was collected, but the inscription on the medallion confirms the sources).
Comment by J. Todd — August 21, 2009 @ 3:24 am
Interesting article. In 1949, Robert A. Heinlein published a science fiction story called “The Man Who Sold The Moon”. His concept was that the purchase of property on earth included rights to land, minerals, et cetera, and therefore should include rights to air and lunar property, given that earth’s moon belongs to the earth as it is held by earth’s gravity in an earth orbit. The main character in the story then proceeded to purchase the rights to the moon from every person whose land was passed over along the moon’s orbital path. It’s an interesting concept, and an interesting story. To read the story, look for it in ‘The Past Through Tomorrow’ by Robert A. Heinlein, pp.121-212.
Comment by Carl N Graves — August 31, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
What if you designed a robot specifically to collect moon rocks, and nothing else? Surely you could get a lot more. Then, think about it: it would be all over the news! “Private company brings back moon rocks from the moon! They are now for sale for $100,000 per gram!” Or some other ridiculous price. Everyone would know about it. It would be the thing everyone was talking about. The demand would skyrocket. You could sell it for profit!
I would do it, but I’m short a couple hundred million dollars.
Comment by Name — October 27, 2011 @ 2:42 pm
I would do it, but I’m short a couple hundred million dollars.
It would take more than that to do so. The proposed NASA “Moonrise” mission is supposed to return samples of the lunar far side. It will cost around $ 1 billion, if approved. But it only collects about 1 kg of rock and soil. That works out to $ 1 million per gram — and not very much in total to boot. Doesn’t sound like a profitable venture.
Comment by Paul D. Spudis — October 27, 2011 @ 3:40 pm
Read “The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert A Heinlein.
Comment by Carl N Graves — April 15, 2012 @ 12:28 am