Is a Moon rock, like this one brought back on Apollo 16, the kind of thing you could leave lying around, forgotten? NASA photo
I’m probably not alone in saying my house isn’t the cleanest, most organized place ever. I don’t live in squalor or anything, but occasionally I just can’t find something I know I have — it’s not lost, you see, I just don’t know where it is. Of course, this doesn’t include my most valuable (and valued) personal possessions that I keep a slightly more watchful eye on.
I guess that means Hawaii’s government keeps things slightly messier than I do. When Joseph Gutheinz, an investigator from Houston, tried to locate Hawaii’s own Moon rocks, delivered by Apollo astronauts 4 decades ago, no one knew where they were. The state had, apparently, misplaced something worth around $10 million on the black market.
Overlooking for the moment the images a black market for Moon rocks brings up (mostly James Bond villains, in my mind), I do wonder how you could possibly lose track of something like this. Officials found the rocks just this week, according to a
story in the Honolulu Advertiser, some 3 months after Gutheinz first began asking around. The story actually quotes a senior official as saying, “We knew they were here. We just weren't sure which cabinet they were in.” Uh huh.
Even if it’s true and they were confident they still had possession of these rocks somewhere, seriously: How do you not know where your Moon rocks are? The cynic in me, who has to fight to convince people that science (and particularly astronomy) actually is quite interesting and worthwhile, sees this as another example of people who don’t know science “not getting it,” in terms of something’s value. Surely, as Gutheinz suggested, if this were $10 million in cash, or perhaps the governor’s private car or plane, everyone would be pretty certain of its location.
But then the bumbling, clumsy part of me acknowledges that mistakes do happen, and that maybe that’s all this was. Maybe it had nothing to do with anti-science sentiment and is just the kind of mistake that can happen to anybody. Heck, I’ve lost car keys before; that’s pretty dumb.
So, what do you think? Can you see anyone ever misplacing something so valuable as a Moon rock? Do you think the officials just didn’t think much of the rocks, or that it could be an innocent oversight? Perhaps more importantly, what do the bidders of black market Moon rocks look like in your mind?