On the 48th anniversary of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon, an Illinois attorney hopes to pocket as much as $4 million at a Sotheby’s auction of a bag that Apollo 11 astronauts filled with rocks.
The bag’s history is as interesting as its travels: the U.S. government accidentally sold it in 2015, then fought the buyer, Nancy Lee Carlson, a suburban Chicago lawyer, to reclaim it. The feds lost that case last year and ceded the bag to Carlson, who is selling it Thursday.
The legal kerfuffle concerns the disposition of an important cultural item that NASA and others don’t believe should be in private hands. Spurred by the auction, a curiously named nonprofit called For All Moonkind is pushing the United Nations to protect the six Apollo landing sites and lunar items such as the bag.
“What we need to do is to create, basically, a Unesco for space,” said Michelle Hanlon, a Connecticut attorney who is leading the effort, referring to the UN world heritage designation.
But as important as securing symbols of that first foray to a celestial body may be, the fight is a small illustration of the potential exploitation to come. As more nations and companies plan missions to the moon, the real fear isn’t of some spacefaring Indiana Jones so much as the impacts of numerous lunar landings or, say, a massive mining operation.
The basic legal underpinning for space activity is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is administered by the UN’s Vienna-based Office for Outer Space Affairs. The agreement’s central tenet keeps space free of all national sovereignty or ownership claims—plus nuclear weapons—and restricts the use of the moon and other space bodies to peaceful purposes. (The U.S. signed it.)
In 1979, the UN General Assembly adopted the Moon Agreement, which says that the moon’s natural resources are a “common heritage of mankind” and that a new international body should govern the use of those resources “as such exploitation is about to become feasible.” (The U.S. and most of the countries that have space programs didn’t sign that.)
Some nations, including the U.S. and Luxembourg, have passed laws to recognize the legal ownership of resources private companies collect in space. And while legal scholars may disagree about whether such laws conflict with the Outer Space Treaty’s mandates against national appropriation, Hanlon said, the point is clear: Plenty of countries and entrepreneurs have grandiose plans for space, with the moon being just one of many commercial and scientific prospects.
Roughly 239,000 miles away, the moon is a large and relatively close target, rich with helium and other resources. At least five nations are actively planning to explore it with manned missions, and China is eager to assess the potential in mining helium-3, a nonradioactive isotope for nuclear fuel that is rare on earth but abundant in the lunar crust.
“It would be great to have those debates” about space commercialization, Hanlon said. “Right now, there’s nothing.”