Moon dust auctioned after court battle

Pre-sale estimate of collection bag used by astronaut Armstrong is $2 to $4 million

The collection bag, used by Armstrong during the first manned mission, featured at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City |

Abag containing traces of moon dust was heading to auction — surrounded by some fallout from a galactic court battle.

The collection bag, used by astronaut Neil Armstrong during the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, was to be featured yesterday at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City of items related to space voyages. The pre-sale estimate is $2 million (Dh7.34 million) to $4 million. The artefact from the Apollo 11 mission was misidentified and sold at an online government auction. Nasa fought to get it back.

In December, a federal judge ruled that it legally belonged to a Chicago-area woman who bought it in 2015 for $995.

Sotheby’s declined to identify the seller. However, details of the 2015 purchase were made public during the court case.

Investigators unknowingly hit the moon mother lode in 2003 while searching the garage of a man later convicted of stealing and selling museum artefacts, including some that were on loan from Nasa.

The 12-by-8-inch bag was misidentified and sold at an online government auction. Nancy Carlson, of Inverness, Illinois, got an ordinary-looking bag made of white Beta cloth and polyester with rubberised nylon and a brass zipper.

Carlson, a collector, knew the bag had been used in a space flight, but she didn’t know which one. She sent it to Nasa for testing, and the government agency, discovering its importance, fought to keep it.

The artefact “belongs to the American people,” Nasa said then. US District Judge J. Thomas Marten in Wichita, Kansas said while it shouldn’t have gone up for auction, he didn’t have the authority to reverse the sale. He ordered the government to return it.

The judge said the importance and desirability of the bag stemmed solely from the efforts of Nasa employees whose “amazing technical achievements, skill and courage in landing astronauts on the moon and returning them safely have not been replicated in the almost half a century since the Apollo 11 landing.”