NASA Accidentally Auctioned Off an Apollo 11 Artifact, and the Owner Won't Give It Back

[PeterK]

In 2015, the bag used on the Apollo 11 mission to carry lunar samples back to Earth was sold to a woman in Inverness, Illinois for $995. She then sent the bag to NASA for authentification, and they discovered that it had been sold without their permission--which makes sense, considering that the bag still has "lunar material embedded in its fabric," according to The AP. The oversight was apparently due to a clerical error, in which the bag was mis-labeled as an Apollo 17 bag. (You would still think would be more expensive than a thousand dollars, but whatever.)

http://bit.ly/2aUvwfG
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WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A bag carried to the moon aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft and used for the first sample of lunar material is at the center a legal fight after the government mistakenly sold it during the criminal case against the former director of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

The white bag — which was flown to the moon on Apollo 11 in July 1969 and has lunar material embedded in its fabric — is "a rare artifact, if not a national treasure," the government said.

The dispute is the latest legal twist in the case of Max Ary, the founder and longtime director of the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson who was convicted in November 2005 for stealing and selling museum artifacts.

 http://apne.ws/2bfVifq
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Peterk
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