Moon Rock Sells $ 855,000 in New York: Sotheby's

NEW YORK: Three lunar rocks were brought to Earth almost half a century ago and the only known documented lunar specimens belonging to private individuals, sold for $ 855,000 in New York on Thursday, Sotheby & announced # 39; s.

The rocks, collected by an unmanned Soviet Luna-16 mission in 1970, accounted for nearly double the $ 442,500 that the current US sellers had paid when selling the history of the United States. Russian space Sotheby's in 1993.

They originally belonged to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, widow of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev – the former director of the Soviet Space Program – who had been handed over to them by the Soviet Union in l. honor of her husband's work.

Korolev was a rocket engineer, a designer of aircraft and spacecraft, and the brain behind the Soviet space program in the 1950s and 1960s.

His work is critical to the success of many Soviet space programs, including the first human Earth orbit made by Yuri Gagarin, but he died in 1966 and never saw moon-soil samples returned from the moon.

In September 1970, Luna-16 landed on the Moon, drilled a 35 cm (14 inch) hole in the surface and took the sample before returning safely to Earth.

It is extremely rare that authentic lunar samples arrive on the market with all those collected by Americans in the hands of the US government, not individuals, said the auction house.

"Space exploration is a universal activity," AFP Cbadandra Hatton, an expert at Sotheby's, told AFP before the sale.

"No matter who can look at the sky and marvel at it, so we have a lot of interest from around the world and from all ages."

Hatton said that the moon rocks had their "own mythology".

"When you really think about the real cost … a lot of lives were lost trying to get up there," she said. "The symbolism of this, the value is far superior to any dollar amount that someone would pay for it at auction."