Moon Rocks Robbery Is NASA Sleuth's Preoccupation

 Of the 842 pounds of moon stones that the numerous Apollo objectives brought house to Earth, all are kept in NASA vaults. All, that's, except a couple hundred "Goodwill Moon Rocks" each considering about one and half grams, small pebbles which were installed on sophisticated plaques and stands and provided as gifts to international minds of claims -- and to only 1 National individual resident: Walter Cronkite, the TV journalist who did a lot more than anyone to narrate America's adventures in place in the 1960s.

In fact, one of the very several issues that Americans are maybe not permitted to own below any conditions, is a moon rock gathered by NASA missions. (Technically, as a matter of law, NASA only loaned the stone to Cronkite.) However fraud men consistently test to sell moon rocks to gullible customers and many of the Goodwill rocks, freighted since they are with the U.S.-Russian space race adventure mystique, and often holding a price as high as $5 million each, have found their way out of the international presidential palaces where they were actually delivered to more tawdry places.

Science writer Joe Kloc has chronicled this contemporary puzzle in a new Kindle Simple, where he trails the actions of NASA senior specific agent Joseph Gutheinz, a man who has managed to get his life's perform to track down the lacking moon rocks.

This short guide is a story of place crime, where the crooks are objective on picking NASA's loosely guarded pockets by embezzling money budgeted for the Mir room station, by ghoulishly trafficking in artifacts scavenged from the 1986 Challenger tragedy, and primarily by offering lunar stones cut back to World by Apollo astronauts.Buy moonrocks online

Throughout 17 lunar objectives between 1961 and 1972, the Apollo program arrived six spacecraft on the moon. The twelve residing Apollo astronauts are the only real people on our world who've walked on a celestial body other than our own. They brought back almost 900 pounds of lunar product and many of those rocks remain locked in NASA vaults. As a gesture of goodwill toward international leaders, and to advertise world buy and peace, President Nixon in 1973 had one specific moon rock, named Test 70017. Cut in to moment pieces and given with respect to the National persons to all fifty U.S. governors and 135 countries round the globe.

The "Goodwill Moon Rocks" each weigh in at an insignificant 1.5 grams (it might get nearly 230 of them to add up to merely a single pound), but they've become a enormous obsession of Joseph Gutheinz, who has turned into a modern-day Sherlock Holmes in his detective quest to recuperate these missing rocks, which as time passes have now been lost, taken, or just "disappeared" in international coups and revolutions. When they do generate again, it's generally on the black industry -- and their draw is in the millions.

To help him in his strange quest, Gutheinz developed a sting function called "Operation Lunar Eclipse" to lure suppliers out to the open. Posing as a rich collector, he was able to recover and reunite a missing rock to the Honduran government. A California fruit wholesaler have been providing to market the rock for $5 million. In his Kindle Single, which includes material from the January 2012 issue of The Atavist, author Joe Kloc uses Gutheinz in his weird quest while also going out by himself on the trail of a few of the other missing moon materials.