Apollo 11 relic to fetch astronomical bid
Dust-up over moon dust bag goes on as auction house eyes record price
It took three auctions before anyone bought the “lunar sample return bag” the U.S. Marshal’s Office put up for sale, unaware that astronaut Neil Armstrong had used it to retrieve pieces of the moon during the historic Apollo 11 mission.
At a 2014 auction, no one bit when the opening bid was set at $20,000. An amateur collector bought the item the following year for $995.
After NASA lost a legal fight earlier this year to reclaim what it called a “national treasure,” the dinner-plate-sized cloth bag is now slated for yet another sale, this one on July 20 — the 48th anniversary of the famed lunar landing. Sotheby’s auction house expects a winning bid of $2 million to $4 million, if not more.
The bag held the first dollop of dust and rocks that Armstrong scooped up from the moon’s surface to bring to scientists back on Earth eager to figure out what, exactly, the moon was made of. People
at the time knew so little about our planet’s natural satellite that when the astronauts returned to earth, NASA stuck them in a decontamination chamber for 88 hours for fear of possible “moon germs.”
The agency launched a fiery response to Friday’s announcement about the new auction.
“This artifact was never meant to be owned by an individual,” NASA said in a statement from William Jeffs, spokesman for the astromaterials division. “This artifact, we believe, belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public, which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred.”
Those events began in the early 1980s when the bag was sent to the Kansas Cosmosphere, one of the world’s largest space museums. At some point in the following decades, it seemed to get lost in a black hole.
Decades later, federal investigators found it at the home of one of the museum’s founders. It was seized sometime before October 2005, when museum president Max Ary went on trial, accused of stealing memorabilia and selling it for personal gain. Among the witnesses who testified for the defense was Capt. Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.
Ary, who led the museum for 26 years and counted astronauts among his friends, was convicted of theft, fraud and money laundering. He spent two years in federal prison. In the aftermath of the trial, some evidence wasn’t clearly labeled and it was not returned to its proper owners. The bag got lost in the shuffle.
In 2014, a small auction house put some of Ary’s seized items up for sale on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service, which manages federal asset forfeiture. Sotheby’s said three separate auctions went without a single bid.
The next year, a Chicago area attorney with an interest in space memorabilia noticed the listing and put in the winning bid. Like every other American kid of the time, 11-year-old Nancy Lee Carlson had watched the 1969 moon landing on television. The space program inspired her to pursue big dreams, Carlson said in February, when federal judges ruled against NASA’s attempt to reclaim the mistakenly auctioned artifact.
Items from the moon landings generally cannot be sold; the federal Smithsonian Institution maintains the historic collection, puts on displays in its museums and loans items to other institutions. There may be a black market for such goods, but never before was NASA equipment from the Apollo missions legally put up for sale.
“There are no other lunar bags out there,” Joseph Gutheinz, a former NASA enforcement officer who sided with Carlson, said in February. “It’s unique as all get out. And because of that, the value of the bag is incalculable.”
Yet when Carlson turned to Sotheby’s, the nearly 250-year-old auction house somehow had to calculate a value for the item it bills as “the most important space artifact to ever appear at auction.”
“When we place auction estimates, they are very much based on detailed research,” said Cassandra Hatton, the Sotheby’s vice president in charge of the sale who looked at items with similar rarity and significance. “It is very much an educated estimate. It wasn’t just pulled out of the air.”
The highest price for space-related items came in 2011, when a Russian businessman paid $2.9 million for a Soviet space capsule that carried a live dog into space in 1961.
“But Apollo 11 is an entirely different thing,” she added, explaining that Soviet artifacts became widely available after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. American items are extremely rare, so Sotheby’s thinks the bag’s selling price may eclipse the record.
“You just couldn’t get your hands on this kind of thing,” Hatton said. “The only way you could do it was by theft.”
The bag, made of specially designed Beta-cloth, has smudges of moon dust visible to the naked eye, Hatton said. Just like Armstrong described to Mission Control, it looks like “powdered graphite.”
The archivist laughed when asked if she got to handle the bag — which she did, wearing nitrile examination gloves.
“It’s an exciting moment,” she recalled. “That’s the closest I’ll ever get to walking on the moon.”