ORLANDO, Fla. -- A federal court Wednesday morning set the value of Moon rocks heisted from the Johnson Space Center in Houston at more than $5 million based upon what it cost the United States to go get them rather than what they might sell for on the open market.
In what some collectors have said is the first official government valuation of the rocks that American astronauts brought back from the Moon during the Apollo expeditions, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed to value Moon rocks and Martian meteorites stolen from JSC at between $2.5 million and $7 million.
The valuation was part of the sentencing of two NASA interns, Tiffany Fowler and Shae Sauer, in U.S. District Court in Orlando earlier Wednesday. The two, who were found guilty of collaborating with two others to pilfer the space rocks and other items from JSC and sell them, were sentenced to three years probation.
Each will serve the first 180 days of the sentence in home detention and will do 150 hours of community service. They also were ordered to pay $9,167 restitution to the space agency to cover the cost of other items and equipment that were either stolen or destroyed during the incident.
Some of the defendants have said they took an entire safe full of meteorites, Moon rocks and other scientific items from a lab at the NASA center in Houston. They were busted in an undercover FBI sting.The other two defendants are Thad Roberts and Gordon McWhorter.
McWhorter was convicted in June. Roberts, who pleaded guilty in December along with Fowler and Sauer to conspiracy to commit theft and interstate transportation of stolen property, testified against McWhorter at the trial.
For space enthusiasts, however, the more interesting element of the sentencing was the requirement to figure out the value of what many scientists and collectors deem priceless items. The co-conspirators apparently were trying to sell the rocks on the Internet for between $1,000 and $5,000 per gram.
The government did that by using the cost of acquisition and market value.
The Moon rocks were valued based upon what it cost the U.S. government to go get them back during the 1960s and 1970s. The court determined that, in 1962-1973 dollars, it cost the government $50,800 per gram to collect the lunar samples.
The interns took 101.5 grams from the Houston space facility. So the total value assigned to the stolen rocks was set at $5.1 million.
It remained unclear what the value of the rocks would be today if sold on the open market, based on the system the government used to value them. Also because of the method used to set that value, it was unclear whether it would be valid to convert the decades-old price to present-day dollars.
At first glance, compared to past experience, the value seemed low. By contrast, in 1993, the famed auction house Sotheby's sold some Moon material brought back by the Soviets at a price equivalent to about $2.2 million per gram.
Using that standard, the 101.5 grams stolen from JSC might be worth as much as $223 million, though it's impossible to know what the true value would be since the merchandise in this case was stolen and might have had to be sold secretly -- basically on the black market.
The Martian meteorites, part of a larger collection that was the result of a massive find by scientists in Antarctica, were priced at $1.8 million based on their believed market value.
Published under license from FLORIDA TODAY. Copyright © 2003 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
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