Suit challenges NASA over vial of moon dust

A Tennessee woman is suing NASA for the right to keep a vial of what she says is moon dust, given to her by astronaut Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.

The financial stakes in the lawsuit are potentially quite high: Just last summer, for instance, a bag containing a trace of moon dust from Apollo 11 sold at auction for $1.8 million. The Tennessee woman, Laura Cicco, has a lot more than just a trace: “probably 10 to 15 cubic centimeters” of the stuff, her lawyer estimates.

Putting a valuation on that much moon dust is nearly impossible, given the rarity of the material and the legal murkiness surrounding ownership of it (more on that in a bit).

But, according to NASA, human astronauts have ferried a grand total of 842 pounds of lunar material from the moon’s surface to Earth during the Apollo missions. Unmanned Luna missions sent by the former Soviet Union brought back about three quarters of a pound more. Material from the moon can also end up on Earth in the form of lunar meteorites.

In 2003 the federal government actually put a price tag on some of its returned moon rocks, in the course of a criminal case involving a group of NASA interns who stole a safe full of moon rocks from a Johnson Space Center laboratory. NASA assessed the value of the rocks at around $50,800 per gram in 1973 dollars, based on the total cost of retrieving the samples. That works to just over $300,000 a gram today.

Let us pause for a little back-of-the-envelope math: If we accept that Cicco has 10 to 15 cubic centimeters of lunar material at an average density of 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, that means she has 15 grams to 22.5 grams of moon dust, which at $300,000 a gram works out to somewhere between $4.5 million and $6.8 million dollars. Not bad for a vial of dirt.

But just because it cost that much to get a moon rock does not mean someone will pay you that much for said rock. In terms of what people actually will pay, we have very little data to work from because these things have hardly ever been legally sold.

NASA maintains that “lunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. Government property.” In other words, the government owns it, and you can’t sell it.

“No Apollo moon rock or loose quantity of [Apollo] moon dust has ever been sold legally,” said Robert Pearson, who edits collectspace.com, a website about space memorabilia.