One Giant Leap: How Lawyer Won Apollo 11 Moondust Case
The legal backstory to Thursday's auction of a cloth bag containing lunar dust from the Apollo 11 mission, expected to fetch between $2 million and $4 million, "is a pretty cool case," said the lawyer who won it.
Christopher McHugh of Kansas City's Seigfreid Bingham said what made the matter fascinating beyond how it stemmed from Neil Armstrong's first scoops of material on the Moon was that it played out across criminal and civil law in courts in Illinois, Kansas and Texas.
He got involved when he received a cold call from a woman in Chicago, Nancy Lee Carlson, herself a transactional lawyer.
She claimed to have purchased the bag in 2015 for $995 in a sale of items seized by the government from a man convicted of illegally selling other NASA material. The man had directed a Kansas space museum, and the sale by the U.S. Marshal was to raise money he owed in restitution.
The bag was identified in the government sale as a "flown zippered lunar sample return bag with lunar dust. Mission Unknown." But upon receiving it, Carlson sent it to NASA to determine if it actually contained lunar material.
It did, and NASA determined it came from the bag that in which Armstrong in 1969 placed his first collections of rock and soil, moments after he uttered, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Upon realizing its significance, NASA held onto the bag Carlson had purchased and asked the Kansas federal court that authorized the forfeiture sale to rescind it. NASA argued it would have demanded the bag back from the U.S. Marshal, had the agency been properly notified about the forfeiture sale and had the bag been accurately identified before it was forfeited and sold.
Last December, Judge J. Thomas Marten of U.S. District Court in Kansas expressed sympathy for NASA. He noted that, even though NASA and the FBI, which initially held the bag as evidence, are both part of the government, that didn't mean NASA should have known about the forfeiture sale.
But he found "an additional hurdle" for the government one that appears insurmountable." That was that Carlson was a "bona fide purchaser" of the bag, so he couldn't set aside the sale.
At this point, McHugh expected NASA to appeal the judge's ruling. But the 60-day deadline passed with no appeal.
The matter then moved to Houston, where NASA had the bag.
There, in February, Judge Vanessa Gilmore held a brief hearing on the government's last-ditch efforts to keep the prize.
Why didn't the government appeal, Gilmore asked Vince Carroll, an assistant U.S. attorney.