Bidders can buy Armstrong's bag

Apollo 11 artifact expected to fetch $4M at auction, to NASA’s dismay

Astronauts Neil Armstrong, left, Michael Collins, center, and Edwin A. Aldrin, are pictured in this 1969 Apollo II crew portrait.
Astronauts Neil Armstrong, left, Michael Collins, center, and Edwin A. Aldrin, are pictured in this 1969 Apollo II crew portrait.

A bag that was used by Neil Armstrong to collect rocks from the surface of the moon in 1969 will go up for public auction in New York on July 20. It is expected to fetch $4 million or more.

The bag, which still contains traces of priceless moon dust, has been on a wild ride over the past half-century -- and not just to the moon and back as part of the Apollo 11 mission that took men there for the first time in human history.

Since returning to Earth, the moon bag's erstwhile custodians have included a museum president who was convicted of theft; a woman in Illinois who had the good fortune to stumble upon the bag, mislabeled, at an online auction; and the NASA space center in Texas, where it was held under lock and key as the U.S. attorney's office fought a yearlong legal battle to transfer the bag into government custody.

In February, a federal court sided with an Illinois lawyer who had purchased the artifact for $995 in 2015, and NASA was ordered to return the bag to her.

It was a disappointing decision for the space agency, which said in a statement that the one-of-a-kind artifact "was never meant to be owned by an individual."

The lawyer, Nancy Carlson, is now putting it up for auction at Sotheby's.

The $4 million expectation could be low, according to Cassandra Hatton, a vice president and senior specialist at Sotheby's. With an "exceptionally rare" piece like this, the sky is really the limit, she said.

"This bag is not only from the first mission, but it was used by the first man to set foot on the moon, and it held the first samples that were collected," she said. "So it's the first of the first of the first."

Many other souvenirs from the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, including the command module, are on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. But the bag first slipped through the cracks after it was lent to a Kansas space museum called the Cosmosphere, according to a December decision written by J. Thomas Marten of the U.S. District Court in Wichita, Kan.

Max Ary, who ran the museum, resigned in 2002. After his resignation, it was discovered that some of the artifacts, including the moon bag, were missing.

The bag was found in Ary's garage in 2003; two years later, he was convicted on multiple counts of fraud, theft and money laundering.

The critical error came when the bag was turned over to the government. It was identified as a different bag -- one that had not been used to collect moon rocks -- because of "a mix-up in inventory lists and item numbers," according to Marten's decision.

The government included it in an online auction, and in February 2015, Carlson saw it and bought it, not knowing the true value.

The story might have ended there had she not sent the bag to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to check its authenticity. There, NASA realized what it had: a priceless artifact, still bearing traces of lunar dust, which should have been in its own custody all along.

So NASA kept the bag. Carlson sued to get it back.

In his December decision, Marten concluded that the sale stemmed from an unfortunate mishap in which NASA was "the victim." He nevertheless left the door open for Carlson's lawsuit, and a federal court in Houston ruled in her favor in February.

Carlson could not be reached for comment, but Sotheby's said that she planned to donate some of the proceeds of the sale to charities including the Immune Deficiency Foundation and a children's health center.

The auction house will put the bag on display during a virtual reality conference on June 22 and 23, and then again on July 13 ahead of the auction, which is open to the public. Interested bidders must register in advance.

That was not the outcome NASA wanted.

"This artifact, we believe, belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public," the space agency said in its statement, "which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred."

SundayMonday on 05/28/2017

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