Depending on when (or if) you read this, the odds are pretty good that someone recently was talking about humans returning to the moon. Or why going to the moon again is not optional, but necessary. Or perhaps that it's not feasible or responsible or conscionable, given the other issues facing people here on the ground. But regardless of what the schmuck on the street has to say, for or against, it doesn't look like anyone is going to spend enough money to put people on the moon again in the next couple of years.
Which might explain why an article like this depresses me more than I would have expected. So the US government in the 1970s decided to dole out moon rocks as ambassadorial keepsakes to friend(ly governments)s and (hoped for) allies and such. And now some of them are missing, presumably in the hands of private collectors.
Can you do anything with moon rocks? As far as I know, they don't power anything, they don't sparkle or gleam, and they're nothing special to the untrained eye. Apparently petrified wood was a reasonable substitute for the missing Dutch moon rock. So unless you've got some really special research to get done, they're not even particularly useful, just very, very rare.
It seems that NASA has a grand total of 842 pound of moon rock left. Until someone else gets a machine to the moon and back, that's it. There is no more access to moon rock. If going to the moon was really a giant leap for all mankind, with "for" meaning "on behalf of", then whoever has swiped pieces of moon rock has effectively refused to share with everyone else on the planet. I gots my piece of history, and the rest of you can go right to hell.
People, we've got to do better than this. Zero-sum games are not the only option.
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