Hoping to get a good price, the collector decides to go to NASA headquarters in Houston to have it notarized. But once the object is in possession, the space agency refuses to return it. “This artifact should never have become the property of an individual,” said a NASA spokesman at the time. The American took the case to court, eventually winning her case and selling it in 2017 for 1.6 million euros at an auction organized by auction house Sotheby’s in New York. But it was only in 2019, after new court cases, that she was able to retrieve the five samples whose sale took place this Wednesday, April 13.
While the sale of artifacts from space missions remains the exception, this isn’t the first time lunar rock has been offered at auction. In 2018, three samples taken during a Soviet unmanned mission in 1970 sold for $855,000 at a sale in New York. These fragments, brought back from the Luna 16 mission, were originally offered to the wife of Sergei Korolev, believed to be the father of the Soviet space program and who died in 1966. If China managed to place a module on the moon in 2013, the only samples that have been brought back to Earth so far are from American and Soviet missions. But maybe not for much longer.