The case of the missing moon rocks

To be honest, I thought we'd all be living in Star Trek by now.

When I was growing up, I watched reruns of the original series, and it just didn't seem that far away. We already had big silver and white spaceships like the Enterprise: NASA's Saturn V moon rockets were blasting off all the time, with crews going farther, staying longer.

I figured that by the time I was an adult, we'd have licked the solar system and gone looking for Vulcans. It seemed reasonable.

I nagged my mom to buy Pillsbury Space Food Sticks. I drank Tang -- the astronauts' favorite! -- and saved the labels to send in for a plastic moon buggy. I had a Sears geology set, so I would be ready to study moon rocks. Best of all, I had the Action Cape Kennedy Carry-All Play Set, a sort of metal suitcase with an air base inside, filled with plastic rockets and spring-loaded launch pads. Yes, they could put your eye out, but astronauts are accustomed to risk; I wanted to go to the moon.

Eventually, I had to face reality. Star Trek had been canceled by the time I discovered it. Then Apollo was canceled, too. Barring an encounter with a flying saucer, I was forced to accept that I would not be leaving this planet.

Then, a few years ago, noodling around online, I discovered that many of the Apollo lunar samples had vanished.

The U.S. missions returned 837.87 pounds of lunar material. Three Soviet Union robotic missions returned an additional 11.5 ounces. That's all there is in the world. Even the smallest amount is impossibly precious.

Two sets of lunar samples, from Apollo 11 and 17, the first and last manned missions to the moon, were awarded by President Richard Nixon to 135 countries, five U.S. territories, and all 50 states. They're termed the "goodwill moon rocks," and are the ones that tend to go missing.

NASA's responsibility ended when they were turned over to the Nixon administration, though the agency is belatedly trying to track them.

Last fall I checked to see where Wisconsin's rocks are. Turns out, they were missing.

Maybe it wasn't too late for me to hold a piece of another world in my hands. Maybe I could look for moon rocks...on the Earth.

If you want to hunt for missing moon rocks, the best place to start is with Joseph Gutheinz, an attorney and former Army intelligence officer.

He previously served as senior special agent at NASA's Office of Inspector General. "Back in 1998 I created an undercover sting operation to find counterfeit moon rocks," he says by phone from his law firm in Friendswood, Texas. "That was a pretty big business. People were involved in it all over the world."

The NASA sting was called Operation Lunar Eclipse. His team set up a bogus firm and advertised that it was buying moon rocks. The idea was to trick con artists with fakes into coming to Gutheinz. Surprisingly, a man in Miami seemed to have the real thing: 1.142 grams of lunar material. The asking price was $5 million.

Assessing the value of moon rocks is difficult, since they can only be sold on the black market. "There was only one legitimate sale of rocks or dust brought back from the moon," Gutheinz tells me. "That was from Luna 16, a Soviet Union unmanned robotic mission. They sold .2 grams in 1993 for $442,500." The Miami seller claimed to have almost six times that.

To work the sting, Gutheinz' team needed $5 million. They got Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot to put up the money. It took two months of negotiation to make a deal.

It turned out to be a goodwill lunar sample from Honduras. It was seized and returned to that country, and Perot got his money back.

In 2002, Gutheinz created the Moon Rock Project at the University of Phoenix. He put his graduate students on the track of lunar samples worldwide. They've found 78 so far. They work with collectSPACE, a website that is the last word on space news, collectibles and goodwill moon rocks.

Journalist and space historian Robert Pearlman is the site's creator, editor and lead writer. The website began in 1999, but its roots go back further.

"When I was 6 years old, I wanted to be an astronaut," Pearlman says by phone from Houston, near the Johnson Space Center.

He covered Operation Lunar Eclipse and became excited to find goodwill rocks himself. He initially searched only for other countries' Apollo 17 goodwill rocks, because he wasn't aware there were more out there. That's how little information there was at the time.

"I didn't have any luck in finding more than a handful," he says. "It became obvious that this was a problem -- that a number of them were lost to history." Almost as bad, some were purposefully kept hidden. One of his readers related a story about finding rocks presumed missing in a different state: "I found it. It's in the back room," the person wrote. "They're not displaying it because they thought it didn't look very pretty."

Pearlman says: "So it became somewhat of a crusade to not only find these rocks but to restore the understanding and appreciation for why they were here and deserve to be in the spotlight."

As of this writing, Apollo 11 samples given to five states and 97 foreign countries and U.S. territories are unaccounted for. Five Apollo 17 state samples are missing, as are those awarded to 81 foreign countries and territories.

So where have missing goodwill moon rocks been found?

Most have been right where they were supposed to be, but there was no paper trail. Others have strayed far.

A dentist had West Virginia's Apollo 17 rock. Alaska's Apollo 11 rock turned up in Texas. Colorado's governor took his state's Apollo 17 rock home with him in 1975 and didn't return it until 2010, long after he had left office.

Canada's Apollo 17 rock was in a warehouse. Malta's Apollo 17 rock was stolen. Ireland's Apollo 11 rock wound up in a landfill.

There was no expectation that moon rocks would become as rare as they are. While Apollo was the beginning of manned lunar exploration, no one anticipated that it would also be its end.

"The bottom line was that, back in the Apollo days, they just thought, 'Gee, we're just going to keep on going to the moon. This is the start. After this initial group [of landings] we'll have a permanent manned presence on the moon and all of that kind of stuff.'" says Gutheinz. "And [the rocks] weren't safeguarded as well as they should have been."

So whatever happened to Wisconsin's moon rocks? Nobody seemed to know.

The evening of Dec. 11, 1972, was exceptionally clear. UW-Madison professor Harrison Schmitt and a coworker, Gene Cernan, decided to go for a walk.

They were on the moon -- and were the last humans to have walked on it.

Schmitt hadn't yet joined the UW, but he is the only scientist to have visited our nearest neighbor in the solar system. All other Apollo crew members were military pilots. He has a doctorate in archaeology, and his friends call him Jack.

"Jack started [with us] in the late '80s, and he has been working with us ever since," says Gerald Kulcinski, director emeritus of the UW Fusion Technology Institute, part of the College of Engineering. "We actually made a couple of proposals to NASA for a lunar lander, and Jack was the lead on that for the university."

As adjunct faculty, Schmitt visits campus several times a year from his home in New Mexico, where he served as a U.S. senator from 1977 to 1983. In 1972 he was an Apollo 17 astronaut. He blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 7.

"The launch went exactly as I expected and was trained for, other than the fact that you don't train for the extremely heavy vibration that comes from the five big engines of the first stage," he tells me from his home in Albuquerque. "If you've ever driven your pickup truck down the ties of a railroad track, it's a little bit like that. The gauges and dials in front of you are unreadable because of that vibration."

During the trip to the moon, Apollo 17's crew took the famous "Blue Marble" photo, one of the very few images of the entire Earth without shadow. It later became a postage stamp. No one recalls who exactly took the photo, but many believe it was Schmitt.

The lunar surface was "a beautiful place to be," Schmitt recalls. "A deep valley, deeper than the Grand Canyon, brilliantly illuminated by a sun brighter than any you experience here on Earth, because there's no atmosphere on the moon."

As on this planet, stars are not visible during the day on the moon. "The mountains on either side of the valley are outlined against an absolutely black sky," he says. "That probably is the hardest thing to get used to: a brilliant sun and a black sky."

During their three days on the moon -- the longest of any Apollo mission -- he and Cernan collected 243 pounds of rock and dust, another Apollo record. By contrast, during Apollo 11 in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin collected a little more than 47 pounds during the two hours and 31 minutes they spent outside their lunar lander.

One 2,957-gram rock Schmitt found was later tagged "Lunar Basalt 70017." It was selected just before they left to rendezvous with their command module and return to Earth.

"It was in the rock debris layer that covers the moon," he says. "This particular rock was right near the lunar module. It was pretty good size."

Back at Apollo Mission Control in Houston, 80 "youth ambassadors" from around the world had gathered as part of a NASA promotion. Transmitting from the moon, Cernan told the children, "When we return this rock or some of the others like it to Houston, we'd like to share a piece of this rock with so many of the countries throughout the world."

"That had been planned," Schmitt tells me. "At the end of our stay on the lunar surface, we would pick up a rock and dedicate it specifically to the children of the Earth, and it would be cut up into pieces and distributed to museums around the world."

It didn't always work out that way. At least one of the goodwill samples cut from Lunar Basalt 70017 was actually awarded by Nixon to a youth ambassador, a 13-year-old from Canada.

And Wisconsin's?

"I hope that you find them," Schmitt tells me. "New Mexico's governor at the time took our state's moon rocks, but finally returned them. Arkansas' were found in with some of Clinton's papers, I believe."

Schmitt has one suggestion: "They might be at the geology museum on the university campus."

They aren't, though the museum previously displayed moon rock replicas. Nor are they at UW Space Place, the astronomy department's education and public outreach center. I continued to identify and eliminate suspects.

For a time, some space buffs believed that one of Wisconsin's samples was at the charmingly named Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bicycle Museum in Sparta, the self-proclaimed "Bicycling Capital of America." Donald Kent "Deke" Slayton (1924-1993), one of the town's favorite sons, was a Mercury astronaut and, later, chief of the Astronaut Office, overseeing astronaut selection and training. The museum website states that "it is home to Wisconsin's only piece of the moon," but it's a different sample, on loan from NASA, not one of the goodwill pieces gifted by Nixon.

"I sent your inquiry to a few people here -- but no moon rocks at Milwaukee Public Museum, and no one has heard about the samples to Wisconsin," Bob Bonadurer emailed me. He's director of the museum's planetarium. "If you do find anything, I would be curious about your results."

Schmitt's mention of governors offered clues, however. The Wisconsin governors during Apollo were Warren Knowles and Patrick Lucey. Knowles died in 1993, and Lucey died last year at the age of 96. It was too many years later to ask anyone from their administrations, even if I could find them. But perhaps newspapers of the day had reported ceremonies at the Capitol, during which Apollo samples were awarded. I checked the public library's clipping files for each governor.

According to the Wisconsin State Journal, Knowles had been given a Wisconsin flag by Slayton and Jim Lovell, a UW engineering alumnus most famous for commanding Apollo 13 ("Houston, we've had a problem"). But their meeting with Knowles was in 1966, three years before the first moon landing. The flag was from Lovell's Gemini VII mission, part of the first rendezvous in space.

I had a little better luck with Lucey. According to the October 1973 issue of the UW's Wisconsin Engineer magazine, astronauts Charles Conrad and Paul Weitz had visited campus "last week" to address 400 students at Union South, after which they visited the Capitol. (Earlier that year Conrad and Weitz had crewed Skylab II, a space station program that made use of leftover pieces of Apollo rockets.)

There was no mention of it in the article, but the headline read, "Skylab II Astronauts Defend Space Research; Astronaut Charles 'Pete' Conrad presents Gov. Patrick Lucey with a small piece of moon rock."

That was all. But was it a moon rock from Apollo 11 or 17? And where was it now?

On a very snowy day not long ago, I trekked to the headquarters of the Wisconsin Historical Society at the foot of State Street. I killed time in the marble lobby by looking at a temporary exhibition honoring Increase Lapham, a significant early explorer, not of the moon but of Wisconsin.

I was joined by Paul Bourcier, chief curator, division of museums and historic sites. A kind man, I got the sense that he was gently humoring someone he thought was a bit mad. He had me sign in, checked my ID, and then escorted me into a secure area. It was dim, filled with dark, institutional cabinets. A single employee was hunched over some kind of report.

And there they were. There were Wisconsin's lunar samples, encased in acrylic and mounted, lying bright on top of a cloth laid over a broad work table.

I measured them. I asked and was allowed to hold them. I took off my glasses to put my eyes as close as I could. I'm afraid I looked an embarrassingly long time. Pieces of another world.

Wisconsin's Apollo 11 display consists of four rice-sized pieces of stone totaling about 50 milligrams, encased in a flattened acrylic globe about the circumference of a Gatorade cap. The rounded casing serves to enlarge the samples but, even so, it's difficult to make out any special detail.

However, their material is assuredly remarkable; analysis of Apollo 11 lunar samples revealed the existence of three minerals that were -- excuse the sci-fi cliché -- previously unknown to science: titanium-rich armalcolite; tranquillityite, a silicate; and pyroxferroite, formed at extremely high temperatures. All were subsequently discovered on Earth, usually in association with meteor impact sites, tranquillityite only three years ago.

The Apollo 11 presentation piece containing the lunar sample is a small podium made of stained, fine-grained wood. It includes a nylon Wisconsin flag that was carried to the moon and back.

Wisconsin's Apollo 17 display consists of a small, rough cube of rock, encased in a Lucite sphere slightly larger than a golf ball, similarly mounted on a fine-grained, stained wooden plaque. The sample is about the size of the nail on your small finger, and is estimated to be 3.7 billion years old. Its dark gray-black surface is curious, like dense steel wool or a broken piece of charcoal, with reflective flecks of silver-blue. This display also includes a Wisconsin flag, carried to the moon and back.

According to Historical Society records, Wisconsin's Apollo 11 display was received by Gov. Knowles in December 1970. He turned it over to the society while cleaning out his work area. His successor, Gov. Lucey, took office the next month. Lucey received the Apollo 17 display in 1973, just as Wisconsin Engineer magazine suggested, but it wasn't delivered to the society until 2001, 28 years later, by Gov. Scott McCallum.

Wisconsin Historical Society records suggest it was on display in the Capitol at "some point." The society has no record that the Apollo 11 display was ever publicly exhibited anywhere. It has no current plans to exhibit either display.

I'd found Wisconsin's lunar samples. But I hadn't rediscovered them. The final clue, if it can be called a clue, came when Gutheinz called me the day after we'd spoken. He thought he remembered that they were at the Historical Society. Pearlman verified that; the collectSPACE webpage just hadn't been updated yet. (NASA's tracking webpage still shows no Wisconsin samples at all, anywhere.)

Though I hadn't known it, last October Eric Ray, the curator of the Museum of the Coastal Bend at Victoria College, in Victoria, Texas, was working on a space exhibit that opened this month. He got in touch with Pearlman.

"In learning about the moon rocks and the search we were doing," said Pearlman, "he got really excited and spent a couple of days and, through his contacts, reached out into the museum community to see what ones he could find." Ray found one in Kansas, one in South Carolina, and both of Wisconsin's.

My search did do one valuable thing, at least. "The important thing is to go and actually make sure they're there," Gutheinz had warned me. "We've had cases where we've gone to look, and they haven't been." So I went. And they were.

It didn't feel like enough. I hadn't done anything special.

Schmitt offers a new, bolder lunar dream. But, unlike my Apollo childhood, his vision seems certain to stretch beyond my life.

"I think that NASA's way for human beings to get to Mars is to go by way of the moon, for a whole bunch of different reasons, not the least of which is that it's going to take a couple generations of young people to make all of this happen," he tells me.

"You've got to remember that Apollo, as with most of humankind's major projects, are efforts conducted by young people. They have to develop the new base of experience," he says. "We do not have a young generation with nearly the diversity of experience necessary to work in deep space. They've definitely been doing a great job with the [International Space Station, in close-Earth orbit], but deep space is a much less forgiving experience."

"We're just going to have to get a new generation of young people to do that."

It's a fascinating dream, but not one I could be a part of. Space travel will always be a distant fantasy for me.

The morning after I examined Wisconsin's moon rocks I was up early, taking my recyclables out to the dumpster. I looked up and it hit me in the face. The moon. Bright, serene, centered in a ghostly winter's mist.

It was cold. I stood there awhile. It would be dramatic to say that I shivered, but I didn't.

I simply chucked my garbage. Michigan's Apollo 17 rock is still missing, and it was time to get to work.