The $1.8m bag of dust

A “contingency” sampling of lunar dust that Neil Armstrong collected from the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969 was the star lot of the Bonhams “Space History” sale in New York last week. According to Armstrong’s biographer James Hansen, the astronaut was so focused on taking photos on the moon that at first he neglected to collect the sample that was a mission priority. If the mission had had to be cut short, Nasa would at least have this small sample of dust and small rocks to show for its efforts. But Armstrong did fill the Teflon bag with two scoops of surface matter, weighing around a kilo in total. The bag then made its way back to Earth – only for Nasa to lose it.

In 2003, the bag turned up in the garage of Max Ary, a director of the Cosmosphere space museum in Kansas, who, two years later, was jailed for theft, money laundering and fraud, says Liam Kelly in The Sunday Times. US government officials seized and sold his space memorabilia, which included the bag, to cover Ary’s fines. The bag was bought for $995 by Nancy Lee Carlson, who sent it to Nasa to be authenticated. Nasa said it was genuine, but refused to return it, arguing that it never should have been sold. The space agency removed the moon dust using double-sided carbon tape, attached to aluminium discs, and the bag was sold in 2017 with Sotheby’s for $1.8m. Meanwhile, following legal challenges, Nasa was eventually ordered to return five of the six aluminium discs to Carlson. They sold for $504,375, including fees, last week. A full-sized model of Sputnik 1, the first manmade satellite in space, sold for $2,550, also as part of the sale, and a signed photo of fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, standing in the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity (pictured), fetched $4,845.