Moon Rocks Expected To Fetch Up To $ 1 Million In Auction

For only the second time in history, someone will be able to buy parts of the moon – legally that is.

Three tiny rocks, the next day, are hitting the auction block next month. The out-of-this-world soil is expected to fetch $ 700,000 to $ 1 million, according to Sotheby's auction house.

An unmanned Soviet spacecraft brought the lunar samples back to Earth in 1970. After that, the USSR presented them to the widow of Soviet training program director Sergei Pavlovich Korolev as a gift.

Korolev was a rocket engineer; aircraft and spacecraft designer; and mastermind of the Soviet space program in the 1950s and '60s. He died unexpectedly before the samples could be gifted to him.

The rocks, which will headline Sotheby's Space Exploration auction scheduled for Nov. 29, fetched $ 442,500 when they were first sold in 1993, according to CNN.

"It was the first time of a piece of a new world," Sotheby's said of that sale. "It remains to this day, the only known fact. We look forward to offering you this amazingly rare and historic artifact to the public. "

Lunar material is generally not available for purchase, at least legally. (In one case in 2011, a woman tried to sell a moon rock for $ 1.7 million, but the buyer was an undercover agent.)

The U.S. government claims to be the property of the Apollo missions to be government property, though a few pieces have been given as gifts to foreign governments. But this is a Soviet sample, and according to Sotheby's, the rock "is the only one known to have been gifted to a private individual."