Unanswered questions fill the cosmos: Are there infinite universes? Why does anything exist? How much would someone pay for moon dust digested by a cockroach?
To that last mystery, humanity was close to an answer this month. Then NASA lawyers stepped in.
Three insects were auctioned off online — along with the lunar dust they obtained in 1969 as part of an experiment to observe the effects of lunar material on Earth life.
Bidding for the auction, billed as “a unique Apollo 11 rarity,” began May 25 and had reached $40,000, said Bobby Livingston, an executive vice president at RR Auction, which specializes in the sale of historic and space memorabilia. †
The price was expected to be much higher Thursday during a live auction at a Cambridge, Massachusetts hotel, but company officials canceled it after NASA claimed the experiment belonged to the agency.
In a letter dated June 15, the agency called the sale of the items “inappropriate and illegal” and said that “no person, university or other entity has ever been authorized” to keep samples from the Apollo mission. NASA also asked the auction house for help identifying the owner of the property.
So what could the vaunted space agency, which has a $24 billion annual budget, possibly want with a few dead insects, the contents of their guts, and a few dots of lunar material? A NASA spokeswoman declined to comment, saying it was an ongoing legal matter, but a 2018 audit by the agency’s inspector general offers some insight.
The agency has lost a “significant amount” of its property due to the “lack of adequate procedures,” the audit said. It found that while NASA had made improvements over the past six decades, reclaiming property was often difficult for the agency due to its reluctance to claim property and inadequate records management.
Due to NASA’s poor records, the agency lost possession of a bag that astronaut Neil Armstrong had used to collect samples of moon rocks, the audit found. The small, white bag was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2017 for $1.8 million. A few years ago, a prototype Lunar Roving Vehicle was spotted by a tipster in a residential area in Alabama. A scrapyard owner eventually sold it at auction for an undisclosed amount.
“NASA has a long history of failing to properly track and monitor historical space artifacts,” said Mark Zaid, an RR Auction attorney who owns historical memorabilia, including a length of rope used to locate former President James Garfield’s killer. to hang.
“It was no surprise that we eventually heard from NASA,” said Mr. Zaid. “But they’re so inconsistent. We never know which item will summon a ghost and which will not.”
The story of the cockroach experiment begins on July 20, 1969, when two members of the Apollo 11 crew—Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—became the first humans to walk on the moon. During their historic mission, they collected 47 pounds of lunar material to bring back to Earth for study.
NASA was concerned whether the lunar soil would be toxic to life on Earth. So it fed the material to 10 “lower animals,” including fish and insects, for 28 days, enlisting researchers from across the country to assess the effects, Science magazine reported in 1970.
A pair of German cockroaches fed the moon diet ended up in the lab of Marion Brooks, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. She found no evidence that the moon dust was toxic to the cockroaches, according to an Oct. 6, 1969, article in The Star Tribune of Minneapolis.
When the experiment ended, the professor returned the cockroaches and the contents of their stomachs to her home, where she kept them until she died in 2007.
In 2010, her daughter, Virginia Brooks, sold the materials. She said in an interview Friday that she couldn’t remember the amount they sold for, but it was nowhere near $40,000. It is not clear if the person who purchased the materials from her is the same person who put the items up for sale at RR Auction. The auction house keeps the seller’s name secret.
Mr Zaid said NASA’s concerns were “sufficient” for the company to land the auction. He said RR Auction had notified the owner of the dispute and would like him and the space agency to “get out.”
“The government has a problem with legal provenance in this case, because at this time they can’t provide any documentation arranging the transaction to provide the roaches to the doctor and the University of Minnesota,” he said.
In addition, Mr. Livingston said, the lunar material was “destroyed on purpose” when NASA fed it to the cockroaches. “It was the cockroaches, not the moon dust, that were provided to Dr. Marion Brooks,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the University of Minnesota did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. Mrs Brooks, the daughter of Dr. Brooks, also looked for a contract arranging the experiment, but couldn’t find one.
She went to her basement and opened a fireproof safe with files about the experiment. There was a plaque that NASA had given her mother, several newspaper clippings about the experiment, and a $100 NASA pay stub that had also belonged to her mother.
Ms. Brooks said she did not regret the amount she was given for the experiment. She thought it was a fair deal at the time. Besides, she said, “they were just cockroaches.”
Alain Delaqueriere research contributed.