A bag containing moon dust owned by a suburban Chicago woman has sold at auction for $1.8 million, after a galactic court battle.
Used by astronaut Neil Armstrong during the first manned mission to the moon in 1969, the collection bag was featured Thursday at a Sotheby’s auction in New York City of items related to space voyages. The pre-sale estimate had been $2 million to $4 million.
The identity of the buyer wasn’t released Thursday, nor was where the moon bag will finally land.
The artifact from the Apollo 11 mission had already made quite the journey — from the moon to the pocket of Armstrong’s space suit, to the garage of a space rock thief, to a government online auction, to the bedroom closet of a northwest suburban Inverness woman, before the government seized it again.
Nancy Lee Carlson, a baby boomer who told the Tribune in the past she had always been fascinated by the Apollo missions, came across the bag, labeled “lunar sample return,” on an online federal auction site. After nobody bid on it during three initial auctions, she snagged it for $995 in February 2015.
Initially, she had told the Tribune, she kept the 12-by-81/2-inch bag, made of white Beta cloth and polyester with rubberized nylon and a brass zipper, in her bedroom closet. A collector, Carlson figured the bag had been used in a space flight, but she didn’t know which one. So she sent it to NASA to verify its authenticity.
NASA officials verified that the bag indeed contained moon dust, a dark-gray fine powder, like graphite, that one astronaut described as smelling like gunpowder.
But once officials knew the bag came from the moon, they confiscated it as government property. The bag had been part of a cache of stolen items found in 2003 in the home of Max Ary, who ran a museum called the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kan., according to court records.
Ary was convicted of stealing and selling space objects, and government officials seized his possessions and sold some of them for restitution. But they mistakenly sold this lunar sample bag, which was confused with another bag that did not contain moon dust.
Carlson filed a federal lawsuit to get it back. NASA argued against returning the bag to her, saying the artifact “belongs to the American people.”
A U.S. district judge in Kansas said that while it shouldn’t have gone up for auction, he didn’t have the authority to reverse the sale. In December, he ordered the government to return it.
Following the judge’s ruling, Carlson told the Tribune she received hundreds of emails a day about the bag, and people showed up at her door, inquiring about it. Because of the intense interest, Carlson said she kept the bag in a secure location unknown even to her.
Carlson did not return calls for comment Thursday.
“I’m thrilled we won,” she previously told the Tribune, about the judge’s ruling. “This is like the Holy Grail.” But, she added, “I’m trying to be as anonymous as possible.”
Sotheby’s said in the past that some of the proceeds of the sale would be used to benefit charities, including the Immune Deficiency Foundation and Bay Cliff Health Camp. Carlson said in the past she planned to set up a scholarship in speech pathology where she went to school, Northern Michigan University.
The “Space Exploration” auction was held on the 48th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and included lunar and space photographs and other artifacts. Sotheby’s touted the Apollo 11 Contingency Lunar Sample Return bag as the “star lot.”
When it comes to moon landings, Thursday’s auction is far from the final frontier.
A group called For All Moonkind Inc. mentioned the moon bag this week while campaigning for “measures to preserve and protect the six Apollo lunar landing sites.”
It plans to take up the issue next month at the Starship Congress 2017 in California.
The Associated Press contributed.
