Six Apollo missions brought back about 380 kilos of material from the Moon, divided into 2,196 samples. NASA keeps almost all of it, and has drawn some 140,000 fragments from it for research. President Nixon also had tiny parcels given to the fifty American states and to foreign heads of state.
In July 2017, at Sotheby's in New York, a canvas bag that had held lunar dust found a buyer at $1.8 million. A woman from Illinois had bought it for $995 two years earlier. Why could this bag be sold, when the dust itself almost never can?
price with fees for the Apollo 11 sample return bag, Sotheby's, July 2017; at the hammer, $1.5M
A chain of custody is the sequence of hands through which an object passes, with proof of title for each.
Here, the price does not pay for the dust. It pays for the fact that a chain ended up with a private owner.
Apollo samples remain the property of the American government: they can only be lent, for research, teaching or display. The parcels offered by Nixon went to states and governments, never to individuals.
The Soviets did otherwise. Three grains brought back in 1970 by the Luna 16 probe, 0.2 gram in all, were given to Nina Koroleva, widow of the Chief Designer of the space programme. This gift to a private person makes them legally sellable: $442,500 at Sotheby's in 1993, then $855,000 in 2018.
Lunar scarcity is real but finite: 380 kilos, with no new American supply since the last Apollo mission. Perceived scarcity is that of the sellable object, and it is much narrower.
Almost everything that exists is off the market, a scarcity decided by a public property right. For the buyer, what is scarce is the right to hold, not the matter.
Reading: each circle is a hand; a solid line means the right passes, a dotted line that it is missing, and the bar marks the break. Luna 16: the chain is intact as far as a private person. State parcel: it stops at the recipient state. Carlson bag: a judgment restores a broken chain. Indicative diagram.
This is the central axis. When the chain is single and given to a person, as with Luna 16, the value is stable and can be resold. When it passes through a state, it cannot be transferred. When it is broken, the value depends on a court.
The Carlson bag was stolen by a former museum director, then seized and sold at auction by the US Marshals Service. NASA then wanted it back. American justice found that the bag should not have been put up for sale, but that it could not undo the sale: it stayed with the buyer.
In 1998, an undercover agent from NASA's Office of Inspector General negotiates with a seller the price of a lunar parcel given to Honduras: 5 million dollars.
The seller claims it is his. The agent replies that it was a gift to a state, which cannot pass to a private person.
The parcel is seized, and the civil case is settled in March 2003.
The story is strong: humanity's last mission to the Moon, a president's gift, a bag saved by a hair. But it holds together only as long as every link is acknowledged.
The Carlson bag has a perfect story, from the mission to the museum, then the theft. It has a very high price because the court closed the story. Without that judgment, the same story would have been worth nothing, or a prison sentence.
The matter's prior existence is beyond reproach: the missions are dated to the day, and NASA's catalogue lists every sample. That same catalogue also proves what is missing: 517 samples lost or stolen between 1970 and 2010.
The mission proves the origin. What is missing is proof that each lot followed a lawful path to its current holder, and that proof cannot be made after the fact.
The scientific value of the dust is immense and belongs to those who study it. The price, for its part, forms at the margin: on the rare links that have left ordinary law, through a private gift or a judgment.
The gap lies in that distance. One pays dearly for the right to keep, without always being able to prove the right to sell.