One small step for man, one giant purchase for one buyer, who is taking home a piece of out-of-this-world history for a little more than $500,000.
A sample of moon dust collected by Neil Armstrong during the first moon landing was sold Wednesday to a private buyer at Bonhams auction house.
Armstrong collected the dust during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission just after taking the first steps on the moon, describing the surface as “fine and powdery” and similar to “powdered charcoal” in remarks radioed to the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.
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The sample, verified by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is seen in a plastic container on five aluminum disks and comes with a storied history.
Small samples of moon dust collected at first moon landing by Neil Armstrong hit the block at @bonhams1793 in two weeks.
Bought for $995 seven years ago, the estimate for sale is $800,000 to $1.2 million.
Initial buyer sold lunar collection bag it was in for $1.8 million! pic.twitter.com/7TTtu0tKUJ
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) March 31, 2022
The moon dust originally came from an Apollo 11 contingency sample return container decontamination bag, which is the bag where Armstrong first placed the sample. It eventually fell into the hands of a museum curator in Kansas.
The bag was later confiscated and sold at a U.S. Marshal auction, according to a description of the sample. The buyer from that auction sent the sample to NASA for verification, and in the process of verifying it, the agency claimed it had reason to keep it.
A U.S. district court ordered NASA to return it to its current owner, and the bag was later sold in a 2017 auction. It was determined that NASA removed the lunar dust from the bag while in its possession, later returning the bag as well, the auction claims.
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NASA has argued moon rocks and dust collected during the Apollo missions fall under the category of government property and therefore cannot be privately owned, but that has not stopped stray lunar materials from falling into unsuspecting hands. In 2011, a woman was detained in a Denny’s parking lot as part of a government sting operation looking into her ownership of a “paperweight containing a rice-grain-sized bit of lunar material,” according to court documents describing the incident.
The lunar dust was originally valued between $800,000 to $1.2 million and sold well below asking price.
