Unanswered questions fill the cosmos: are there infinite universes? Why does a thing exist? How much would you pay for moon dust digested by a cockroach?
On that latest mystery, humanity came close to an answer this month. But NASA lawyers intervened.
Three insects were put up for auction online — along with moon dust, they were fed as part of a 1969 experiment to look at the effects of moon material on terrestrial life.
Bidding for the auction, billed as “a unique Apollo 11 rarity,” began May 25 and reached $40,000, said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, which specializes in selling historical and space objects. .
The price was expected to rise much higher in a live auction at a hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 “improper and illegal” and said “no person, university or other entity has ever been given permission” to keep samples from the Apollo mission. NASA also asked the auction house for help identifying the object’s owner.
What could the famous space agency, which has an annual budget of $24 billion, want with a few dead insects, the contents of their innards and a few particles of lunar material? A NASA spokesperson declined to comment, saying it was an ongoing legal case, but a 2018 audit by the agency’s inspector general gives some insights.
The agency lost a “significant amount” of assets it owned due to “lack of proper procedures”, according to the audit. She found that while NASA has made improvements over the past six decades, property recovery has often been difficult for the agency because of its reluctance to assert ownership and poor records management.
Due to disorganized records, NASA lost possession of a bag that astronaut Neil Armstrong used to collect samples of moon rocks, the audit found. The small white bag sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $1.8 million in 2017. A few years ago, a prototype lunar probe was spotted by an informant in a residential neighborhood in Alabama. A junkyard owner ended up selling it at auction for an undisclosed price.
“NASA has a long history of not maintaining proper controls on its historic space items,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney at RR Auction, which owns historic objects, including a piece of rope used to hang the assassin of former President James Garfield.
“It was no surprise that we finally heard from NASA,” Zaid said. “But they’re so inconsistent. We never know which item will raise a specter and which won’t.”
The story of the cockroach experiment begins on July 20, 1969, when two Apollo 11 crew members — Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — became the first humans to set foot on the moon. On their historic mission, they collected about 21 kilograms of lunar material to bring back to Earth for study.
NASA was concerned that lunar soil would be toxic to life on Earth. So he fed ten “lower animals,” including fish and insects, the material for 28 days and recruited researchers from across the country to assess the effects, Science magazine reported in 1970.
Some German cockroaches that were fed the lunar diet ended up in the laboratory of entomologist Marion Brooks at the University of Minnesota. She found no evidence that moon dust was toxic to cockroaches, according to an article published in The Star Tribune of Minneapolis on October 6, 1969.
When the experiment ended, the teacher took the cockroaches and the contents of their stomachs to her home, where she kept them until she died in 2007.
In 2010, his daughter, Virginia Brooks, sold the materials. She said in an interview last Friday that she didn’t remember what they were sold for, but that it didn’t come close to $40,000. It is unclear whether 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 is keeping the seller’s name private.
Zaid said NASA’s concerns were “sufficient enough” for the company to cancel the auction. He said RR Auction had alerted the owner of the dispute and would like him and the space agency to “settle” it.
“The government has a problem of legal merit in this case, because at this time it cannot provide any documentation regarding the transaction of supplying the cockroaches to the doctor and the University of Minnesota,” he said.
Furthermore, Livingston claimed that the lunar material was “purposely destroyed” when NASA fed it to cockroaches. “It was the cockroaches, not the moon dust, that were given to Dr. Marion Brooks,” he said.
On Friday, Virginia Brooks looked for a contract on the experiment, but couldn’t find it.
She went to the basement of her house and opened a fireproof safe that contained files about the experiment. There was a plaque that NASA gave her mother, several newspaper clippings about the experiment, and a NASA paycheck worth $100 that also belonged to her mother.
Brooks said she didn’t complain about the amount she received for the experiment. She thought it was a fair deal at the time. Also, “they were just cockroaches.”
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
