Slippery People
This past summer, my daughter Stella and I visited Colorado for a show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre—an astonishing music venue about which many tributes have been penned. Per a suggestion from my sister-in-law, we took an afternoon to visit the museum at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.
What a place! Case upon case of minerals, fossils, gems and rocks—not all of which had been harvested terrestrially. Among my favorite displays were the boring brown and grey nothing-boulders that fluoresced cartoonishly trippy colors when illuminated by UV, and scary, fossilized examples of ocean-bound critters from millennia ago.
The museum’s collection boasts two moon rocks brought back from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission to the moon (yeah right--like that actually happened). Apparently, President Nixon awarded two moon rocks to each of the states and several countries in 1974. These became known as the “Goodwill” moon rocks.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Talking Heads’ album Speaking In Tongues! So what, you say? So it’s a great album that led to what I assume was a great tour, that was immortalized in Jonathan Demme’s excellent movie, Stop Making Sense. And the second track on Side 2 of Speaking In Tongues . . . a nervy and thumping groove with an unwavering bass line called “Moon Rocks”
So take your hands out of your pockets
And get your face adjusted
I heard it, somebody lied
And I'm staring out the window,
Gonna let this thing continue
In its natural time
><><><><><><><><><><><><><
I’d never really thought about it before, but moon rocks are priceless. That is, there is no market value we can place on them—there is no legitimate market for moon rocks. On Earth, they exist only in the collections of research institutions or governments. Regular folk can’t get their hands on them. The scarcity of moon rocks on Earth creates a conundrum for private collectors: if they really want a piece of the Moon’s shell, they will have to pay through the nose, and they better not tell anyone—it’s against the law.
In 2002, Thad Roberts, a NASA intern, stole a safe holding moon rocks from a heavily-guarded lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He went to prison for his crimes, and his story is nuts!
Ben Mezrich wrote about this clown show in his book Sex On The Moon (Doubleday, 2011). If you like stories about overly ambitious, complex heists, this may be your cuppa. There’s a particularly daring get away at 5 mph (strictly enforced speed limit within the NASA compound).
><><><><><><><><><><><><><
cheers, luca