Controversial Apollo 11 Moon Dust Samples Fetch $500K At Auction

Very small amounts of moon dust collected during Apollo 11 fetched $500,000 at an auction. This comes after the controversial dispute over the ownership of the samples.

The moon dust was part of Bonhams' Space History Sale that was held Wednesday, according to collectSPACE. The item included five Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) aluminum sample stubs, four of which included particles that were among the first to be collected by Neil Armstrong on July 21, 1969, Bonhams noted.

The auction house described it as "a unique opportunity to own a NASA-verified piece of the Apollo 11 contingency sample." Prior to the auction, the item was expected to fetch a whopping $800,000 to $1.2 million. However, the bidding was opened at $220,000, and the winning bid was at $400,000, for a total final price of $504,375, including the buyer's premium.

The winning bidder was not identified, but it was said to be the end of a rather controversial history for the samples. The samples came from the Apollo 11 Contingency Sample Return Container (CSRC) Decontamination Bag. However, this bag somehow got lost and was later found in the personal collection of a previous director of a space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, according to National Geographic.

Another mix-up led to the bag being auctioned off for just $995 to a purchaser who sent the bag to NASA to determine its authenticity. Upon confirming the item's genuineness, however, NASA reportedly refused to return the bag, noting that Apollo-recovered lunar materials were considered to be "National Treasure" and were not for private ownership.

"This artifact was never meant to be owned by an individual," NASA spokesperson William Jeffs said in a 2017 statement, citing its "scientific value," as per National Geographic.

The auction winner sued to have it returned and eventually won. The bag was auctioned off for $1.8 million in 2017.

Later, the purchaser sued NASA again for keeping some of the samples and "damaging" the bag, which allegedly prevented it from being sold at the original estimate. The agency eventually returned five of the six scanning electron microscope samples. According to National Geographic, those were the samples that were sold at Bonhams.

Other space history items sold at the auction included a fragment from Sputnik 1 and an Apollo moon map signed by 15 astronauts.