Joe Kloc

A fun little Kindle Single (originally published on The Atavist) by Joe Kloc, “The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks” follows one man obsessed with accounting for all of the moon rock samples given out to foreign governments, and to each state by Richard Nixon following the end of the Apollo program. Turns out a substantial number of these samples have gone missing, and remain so to this day.

After Apollo 17 made its way back to Earth part of one of the rock samples it returned, known by NASA as Sample 70017, was divided into pebble sized pieces, encased in Lucite, affixed to a commemorative plaque along with a national flag that had flown to the moon, and was presented to leaders of all the countries in the world as a gesture of peace and goodwill. Many of those countries apparently weren’t all that impressed as most of them have apparently lost, sold, or misplaced their piece of the moon. Occasionally some have popped up on the black market. One man made it his personal mission to track down as many of these as possible.

In the United States it is illegal to sell or buy Apollo moon rocks, pieces of Apollo 1, and pieces of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. Special NASA agent Joseph Gutheinz made it his personal mission to stop and to arrest anyone attempting to do so. He had a fair amount of success, recovering one of the commemorative pieces given to the Honduras that ended up sold to an American collector and another lost in a museum fire in Alaska. As this little single reads like a detective story (which in fact it is), I won’t go further.

I enjoyed this as far as it goes. I hadn’t really read anything about this before so this was new information to me. It is well enough written though it ends very abruptly. It took me 45 minutes to read, so well worth the diversion!… (mer)