Hoping to get a good price, the collector decides to go to NASA headquarters in Houston to have it authenticated. But once in possession of the object, the Space Agency refuses to return it. “This artifact should never have become the property of an individual”, said a NASA spokesperson at the time. Taking the case to court, the American finally won her case and sold it in 2017 for an amount of 1.6 million euros during a sale organized in New York by the auction house Sotheby’s. But it was not until 2019, after new legal proceedings, that she was able to recover the five samples, the sale of which took place this Wednesday, April 13.
If the sale of artefacts from space missions remains exceptional, it is however not the first time that lunar rocks have been offered at auction. In 2018, three samples taken during a Soviet unmanned mission in 1970 sold for $855,000 at a sale in New York. These fragments, brought back by the Luna-16 mission, had initially been offered to the wife of Sergei Korolev, considered the father of the Soviet space program, and who died in 1966. If China managed, in 2013, to place a module on the Moon, the only samples brought back to Earth to date come from American and Soviet missions. But maybe not for long.